Mutti Wird Dich Lieben
by LoveSupreme
Summary: Set a year after Fools Rush In, Erik finally takes Charles across the Atlantic to meet his mother. AU-Modern, AU-No Powers. WIP. I should also state here that this story is a one-shot and so cannot really be said to be a sequel, although 1 is in the works
1. Chapter 1

A/N: I would just like to say before I get this show on the road that 1) this updating schedule is going to be more relaxed than the last one, all apologies: I'll try to update every Saturday.

Mutti, heute solltest du lächeln,

wenn ich zum Traualtar geh.

Erik rested his chin lazily in the cup of his hand and stared out of the thick port-hole window as he caressed his spare fingers absent-mindedly over Charles' palm. He tried to remember if he had told Azazel that the phone bill was due on the 2nd, or that Sean couldn't work the night of the 22nd and hadn't found anyone to cover him yet, if he had seemed ambiguous enough on what to do with the cat.

There had been a stray cat haunting the café for the past few weeks and Erik was trying to strike an ambiguous line between complaining about it constantly but not quite so constantly that anyone at the café felt the need to do anything about its presence. As far as any human being was aware, Erik referred to it only with great annoyance as "that cat." In actuality, when he knew for absolute certainty that he was completely alone, he jovially called it "Charlie"—something his boyfriend had actually once elbowed Erik for calling him (followed by profuse and even tearful apologies). He also gave it tuna and blamed it on the soft-headed florist next door.

Despite all the perks of this trip it had one serious drawback: no one would be around to give Charlie his tuna.

_Well, maybe more than just _one_ serious drawback_, he thought as he tried to ignore Charles beside him _giggling _with his new flight-attendant friend. The man really was incapable of _not_ making new best friends every damned place he went. Erik swore he was an eccentric collector, trying to get one of everything. This should take care of Flight Attendant Friend, Erik supposed.

He was used to ignoring worse from the cafe, though, so he simply closed his eyes and delved into a happier place:

He sucked on the inside of his mouth and could still taste Charles there. His scalp was still sore from where the smaller man had been driven to yank on his hair in that certain frenzy of violence that only sex could send him to. He wasn't certain what their capabilities towards lovemaking were going to be once they arrived in Germany, so to be on the safe side he had decided to suck Charles absolutely dry before they left, and the smaller man had energetically and vocally agreed with that decision.

Only when the other man was sighing into his ear did he realize the loquacious flight attendant had left to complete her duties.

"You have got to stop making those deliciously pleased sounds," the brunet huffed as he laid a pleased kiss to Erik's jaw. "_if_ you expect me to refrain from dragging you into a membership in the Mile High Club."

Erik frowned and sat back in his seat.

"I don't understand why you're so interested in having sex in minuscule, tinny port-a-potties, in front of all and sundry," Erik argued. They had been arguing about this a lot lately.

Sex in the amphitheatre he could get behind, or that submarine they had sight-seen at in the fall, but he really saw nothing sexy about fucking in bathrooms, shower excluded.

"Maybe I'll have you convinced by the trip back," Charles sighed, ever hopeful.

Erik didn't bother to crush those hopes by assuring the younger man that there was simply no possible way that was going to happen.

They moved on to other, even more detestable topics of conversation.

"How do you think Raven's doing?" Charles asked anxiously for the hundredth time since they'd left her and Azazel at the airport drop-off zone barely an hour ago.

Charles had spent the two minutes it took to get their bags from the car apologizing and pleading with his sister to not feel abandoned over Christmas. Erik had spent it upbraiding Azazel about the cafe: don't forget to give Janos the spare key, don't forget to take care of time-sheets, don't forget-

"Please, stop this," Azazel had finally been driven to growl, face devil-red. "I really will impale you."

Raven hadn't said a word, only glared and kicked the ground and pouted like a preteen. If Azazel was going to impale anyone, it should be her. Even Erik's threats of bodily harm hadn't been enough to prevail upon her the importance of her refraining from making her brother miserable by showing off how unhappy she was about being left behind for the holidays.

"Why _can't_ I come with you?" she had whined to Erik when he "pretended" to choke her into compliance back at the house. Her pathos left no room for self-preservation.

"Are you seriously asking me why you can't come to my house in Germany to meet my mother for my Jewish holiday?" he had growled back.

She saw no ridiculousness in this situation and nodded tearfully. He had tossed any tactfulness to the wind-that was Charles' concern-and knocked her once on the side of the head, too lightly for her to complain to her brother over it.

"I'm not dating you, you idiot. My mother couldn't care less about meeting you."

She had started bawling immediately, great globbing streams of tears, and because crying always made her more wrathfully violent, she had started hitting him hard enough to bruise so that he had actually had to shout out for Charles to call her off. He knew better than to reply to her violence in kind. Charles was a dear, but he would do nothing but straight murder Erik for laying a harsh hand on his sister.

He rolled his shoulder, sure that he could still feel some of those bruises, days afterwards.

"She'll get over it," he assured. He was certain that Azazel wouldn't mind helping get her over it, so long as sex was still a great way to distract someone, and Erik well knew that it was.

"I'm her only family," Charles started up again, and Erik was sure that he could sprout the rest of this monologue by heart, so he tried.

"And you've never been apart for the holidays before, except for that one time when she wanted to do the Winter Soltice celebration with her Wiccan friends upstate and wouldn't let you come. And even when Reed took you to Majorca in college you insisted that he invite Raven, too," Erik said, and would have continued, but Charles clapped a rueful hand over his mouth and said to him, extremely seriously:

"I really do not appreciate that, Sharky."

Erik blushed-Charles only pulled out the shark references when he was really fed-up with him.

He pushed Charles' hand from his mouth and wrapped an apologetic arm around the man's shoulders, pressing him close to his chest despite the absolutely huge arm rests they had in first class, and affectionately buried his nose in Charles' trimmed hair.

"I'm sorry, dove," he murmured. "I know it's hard."

Charles squeezed him back and pulled away enough to kiss him softly on the mouth.

"Thank you. I'm sorry I referred to you as a murderous ocean stalker."

Erik smiled and would have leaned in those extra few centimeters to kiss him all over again, but someone was hemming their voice clear, and it seemed especially demonstrative.

He looked up just in time to see the burly woman in the second row giving them a dirty look before turning away like a coward.

"Is it still the Mile High Club if we do it right here instead of the bathroom?" he questioned, glaring daggers back at the woman who was now pretending to read the safety information. He hoped they crashed simply for the chance of seeing her properly terrified. He took that back immediately though, rubbing Charles' thigh. He supposed technically it wasn't worth it.

The brunet did his best to further distract his boyfriend from his new murderous vendetta against 2-C: The Homophobe Toad.

"Are you excited to see your mother again?"

Erik recognized what the cunning man had done, but couldn't fault him for a job well-done: it was impossible to carry out a vendetta while thinking of his mother, so long as the vendetta did not _include _his mother.

"Yes, of course," he grinned, and Charles smiled back sweetly in what Erik acknowledged was his most innocent visage.

"And your aunt?"

Erik grimaced and turned away with a growl. "She's not my aunt."

"Erik-"

"She's technically my father's sister, all right, I'll grant you that-but they were estranged and I've hardly even seen her my whole life. Plus, she's feeble-minded," he accused.

"Erik!" Charles balked.

"Well she is," Erik grumbled unhappily. "She's lucky my mother is so dear and took her in at all-she didn't have to. And now what? My mother does all the work for two people because Irena can't be bothered to take care of herself-or work for herself!-or pay for herself!"

"Your mother likes the company," Charles sighed, sitting back again.

"Some company!" Erik scoffed. "Conversations with her amount to scrounging around for a topic she can't burst into tears over."

"She lost her brother and her husband all in the same year," Charles reasoned. Erik would never have told him the sad woman's history if he had known the brunet would use it against him in arguments. He must have done it back when he was a novice in the art of arguing with Charles.

"Her _estranged_ brother. And it was a marriage of convenience," Erik argued back. It was useless; Charles was incapable of putting stock in so pessimistic an assimilation of the facts.

"I'm sure she still loved her husband, Erik. And the estrangement probably made it even worse, what with the lack of closure," Charles reasoned. Erik gave up; he had grown very adept at doing that when it came to arguing with his boyfriend.

"Believe what you want, dove," he condescended to get in the last word and took out a book as they finally got ready for take-off.

When he realized his book was actually boring (Charles had gotten it for him; it was apparently about young boys during the Holocaust who were friends against the odds. "I thought you liked books about Jewish history," Charles complained. Erik struggled manfully not to roll his eyes) he tossed it away and turned to his boyfriend.

"I'm going to sleep. Wake me up when the food comes?"

"Yes, dear," Charles nodded over some papers he had brought to grade, and then glanced at him jealously. "How do you fall asleep on planes?"

"I can fall asleep anywhere. I have absolute will-power," he said proudly, settling back and putting his feet up.

"This must be how annoying it is when I talk about never getting hangovers."

Erik grinned. "Wait until I brag about it a few more hundred times, then you'll know my pain."


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Before I began I wanted to go over a difference in syntax regarding the term 'sequel'. I don't REALLY consider this a sequel to Fools Rush In since it doesn't pick up the mood of where FRI left off (namely, Tom). This story will not deal with the Tom issue in the slightest, so please, be warned.

On a lighter note, thanks you so much Samantha for beta'ing it up with me! I really appreciate it! Now, on to the fluff!

* * *

><p>Charles ordered him some kosher fare, and got in on it himself ("to practice"), and when Erik had sucked it all down in record time he went immediately back to sleep.<p>

His body woke him up a few hours later and the cabin was dark for sleep but Charles had the light on and was still reading (annoying the Homophobe Toad-good jobs old boy), tossing around in his chair-a kick must have landed, or maybe the man's persistent fidgeting had jolted him awake.

"What's wrong?" he mumbled, reaching out a hand to stroke Charles' hair back. Homophobe Toad turned in her seat as if his soft questioning had woken her. He bared his teeth at her and she hid behind her pillow.

"I can't sleep," Charles sighed, leaning into his touch petulantly. "I hate sitting still like this for so long, so inactive..."

Erik laughed at him. "You're a scientist: ninety percent of your job is done sitting down."

"At least that's mentally stimulating. This is miserable."

Erik quirked his brow at the younger man. This sort of talk wasn't like him: normally everything was sunshine and roses.

He sighed and sat up straighter to shake the sleep from him but Charles put a staying hand on his shoulder.

"No, don't," he pleaded. "Maybe I just need to get settled."

The brunet climbed out of his seat and fit himself into Erik's, cuddling up to his chest. Erik smiled and put his arms around the smaller man, breathing in the soft clean scent from his clipped hair.

"What are we going to do in Germany, _liebling_? Sleeping arrangements might not be so comfortable."

Charles rolled up onto one shoulder and whispered, "You think fitting two grown men into one first class seat is comfortable? You really must love me." Then he leaned forward and kissed him soundly on the mouth, brushing his tongue against his lips until Erik allowed him to deepen the kiss.

"Hem hem," they heard, loud and clear.

Erik unbuckled his seat belt and was all for ripping it from the chair to beat the woman with it but Charles stopped him, plying him with cuddling.

When that didn't quite cover it he tried to add conversation to the distraction.

"Darling, I forgot: what did you have to wake Logan up to talk about this morning?"

Erik swore under his breath. He had been hoping the other man wouldn't have noticed that, or at least that he would chalk it up to random discussion rather than anything serious enough to be asked about afterwards.

"Oh, just about the apartment while we're gone. Just to check on Raven or...stuff," he lied uneasily. He was much better at lying to people who were not Charles. Luckily, Charles refused to believe that a lie would ever leave his mouth, so he didn't have to be particularly good at it to fool the trusting brunet.

"That is so sweet of you," said man murmured, kissing Erik single-mindedly.

They dutifully ignored Homophobe Toad's hemming.

When Charles was snuggled up sweetly to his chest again Erik relaxed back and thought hard about if Charles had really been convinced by his lie, or was only pretending to be convinced to keep Erik off his guard and thus more easily find out his lie.

To think that he had used to imagine manipulation beyond the scope of his sweet little _Helligkeit. _Those were the days.

Erik wished they would hurry up and arrive in Heidelberg so he could force his mother to give him advice. It was ridiculous. Normally she _loved_ giving him advice-for everything from what coffee brand to serve at the cafe to whether or not he should list Charles as his emergency contact. So how was it that he was approaching the biggest gauntlet of his life so far with nothing but a paltry "No, kleiner, it should come from you."? It was absolutely insane.

But what could he do over Skype? The more he pushed her to goddamn give him some pristine motherly advice already, the more she feigned technical difficulties ("_What's that, kleiner? I'm sorry, I think your microphone is perhaps broken. I will talk to you next week, Schatzi. Ich liebe dich_.") When he arrived in Heidelberg, all of that would change. She couldn't escape her motherly duties forever. Eventually, she would have to pick out all the perfect words that would make it impossible for Charles to refuse to move in with him.

Really, Erik wouldn't have worried about the situation at all if it were just the two of them: he loved Charles and Charles loved him back and they had been dating for over a year now and they got along marvelously even now that he did not suspect Charles of being the love child of Christ and Ghandi, and even though Charles now knew that he himself was actually a pretty cynical man who really _did_ believe that a large portion of the world's population was beyond rehabilitation to the point that they should be destroyed (it had literally taken Charles six months to wrap his head around that belief, and Erik suspected that the man had not entirely given up on changing Erik's mind about it). When all these elements aligned, you moved in together. Erik had visited enough dating forums, augmented with extensive Yahoo!Answers research, to figure that out.

The problem, of course, was Raven.

You would think that a twenty-two year old girl would get fucking tired of living with her dotty old brother with extensive visiting by his caustic boyfriend, but she apparently couldn't get enough of it. Not that Erik had been dumb enough to ask her if it would be okay to steal her brother from her, but the signs towards the negative were all ridiculously obvious even without him flat-out asking.

This trip was only the most recent of examples. The thing was kind of a surprise, he granted: he had informed his mother months ago that he and Charles had exchanged their first 'I love you's and she had wept and absolutely demanded that she get to meet Charles. Erik had appeased her over Skype, something Charles had been whining for for absolute months. When he told his mother he wanted Charles to move in with him, she had turned down his requests for advice and absolutely commanded that he bring this man to Germany to meet his mother for Hanukkah.

That had been in November and he thought that Charles was going to jump right out of his skin for joy at the news, before he started sprinting wildly around the house trying to find his German phrasebook and his copy of _What to do When You're Dating a Jew _so that he could dust off his Hanukkah customs.

Then they had sat down at the calendar and Charles had realized that Hanukkah that year landed long before winter vacation, and he spent the next three days convincing the university to let him skive off.

Only then had they remembered Raven.

Only then had Erik been subjugated to furious, shrieking wails from the young girl, accompanied by long diatribes from his boyfriend about how they had never been apart for the holidays (except that one time-Raven-Wiccan friends-Charles wasn't invited) and did he think maybe they could bring her along?

Erik covered up his selfish wish to share his boyfriend solely with his mother, to experience Germany (Charles' first time, for all his extensive travelling) alone together, with hard-boiled facts.

"We're staying at my mother's: there's barely room for the two of us."

Raven had countered by insisting she could stay at a nearby hotel.

He had argued that it would be all Charles hanging out with his mother and bonding, not something he wanted Raven to infringe upon.

"I can leave them alone together!" Raven argued. "I leave him alone with you all the time!" Erik could argue that easily: she _didn't _leave them alone, ever. Their one respite was running away to Erik's house, and even then she felt it her right to call Charles at any time of day or night, and for stupid shit, too, like clothing choices or picking the right word for her essay or where were the tea cakes he had bought the other day? Erik had been interrupted in the middle of the funnest stuff more times than he could count or would care to remember.

Not this time.

She had gone about wiggling her way out of schoolwork for the whole three weeks they'd be gone, which included the final days of classes, all of Study Week, and the beginning of Finals Week, and it was it was only when Raven's environmental sciences' professor refused to defer her final, set at the beginning of the week, that she had had to give up the ghost. Erik had had to pay the man a hefty fee for it, and agree to keep Charles and his persuasive ways far away from the poor guy. Raven had fallen immediately into bitter cursing, and then a full-fledged temper-tantrum.

"He'll be back by New Years, what's your fucking problem?" Erik had snarled over her wailing.

His response was Raven coming after him with her science textbook and threatening him with a concussion.

Really, could anyone blame him for wanting a nice place to keep Charles that was not anywhere around her antics? What was so very selfish about wanting his boyfriend to himself, or at least setting up a fifteen-minute boundary between the man and his eccentric sister?

It wasn't that he didn't like Raven-most of the time they got along very well: they were both sinister and cynical and it was a great enjoyment to meet eyes over Charles' naive little head and roll them in unison. But that did not mean that he liked hanging out with her _more_ than he liked hanging out (or doing more than just hanging out) with his boyfriend. Sometimes you just needed fucking alone time, and so long as Raven did not understand what that meant it would be impossible to have Charles to himself but at the same time have Charles and Raven living together.

And, really, what was so bad about Charles and Raven not living together anymore? They had been living together their whole fucking lives, or at least since Raven was adopted. No twenty-nine year-old man should still be living with his twenty-two year-old sister. It just wasn't right. And they should be able to keep away from each other for the three fucking weeks it would take for Charles to meet his mother and celebrate Hanukkah along with some cheerful holiday backpacking.

"What's wrong?" Charles questioned beside him, dragging him back into the present with one innocuous sentence.

"Huh? Nothing," he coughed nervously.

"You're all tense," Charles pointed out. Erik forced all his muscles to relax dictatorially.

Charles eyed him carefully, but then laid back, jangling his foot as he always did when he wanted to get up and be active but wasn't allowed to.

"Go to sleep, _Geliebter,_" Erik suggested, and Charles sighed heavily and changed the subject.

"What will you call me in Germany? Everyone will know what you're saying to me," he pointed out.

Erik shrugged. "I don't mind. It's no secret," and then he smiled and twisted to kiss over Charles face, continuing "Lovely one, brightness, beloved, little mouse..."

"_Hem hem!" _started up the lumpy woman again.

Erik sighed dramatically into Charles' hair and the smaller man reached up to caress his face.

"Maybe I'll ask Diana if she can have the woman kicked out?"

"It'll be a good test of how persuasive you can be," Erik chuckled, and lay back for Charles to press the call button and give his all.


	3. Chapter 3

Getting through customs was simple, and Erik was glad that Charles was considered an EU citizen so they could breeze through the relatively smaller line there. He was overjoyed to see Homophobe Toad languishing bitterly at the back of the line of foreigners, and took the opportunity to tell the customs official that he suspected she was trafficking drugs.

"What's that about?" Charles questioned, watching the official talk in rushed, clipped sentences to his walkie-talkie.

"It's nothing. German's just a serious-sounding language," Erik shrugged, trying to chock up his beaming smile to the joy of being in Germany again and not the pure enjoyment of wreaking havok without Charles being able to stop him. He was going to have to make full use of this blessing before they went to Paris and Charles' French skills would thwart similar tricks.

"I feel kind of bad about getting that lady kicked out to coach," Charles admitted, rubbing his eyes.

"Don't. Her replacement was way better."

"He was pretty nice," Charles admitted with a tired grin.

"Anyone who travels with enough lemon drops to share with all of first class is fucking awesome in my book," Erik said, taking their passports back from the customs attendant and marching them to their bags.

At the baggage carousel Charles took a seat on the ledge and glanced listlessly as the bags started making their way onto the platform.

"Did you end up getting any sleep?" Erik questioned, stroking Charles' hair. The smaller man rested his brow on Erik's hip and shook his head. "Well, you can sleep on the train."

"Are we taking a cab to your mother's house or did you want to rent a car?"

"My mother's lived here for ten years with no car; I think we'll survive a couple weeks without one."

"I'm not arguing," Charles pointed out.

Erik chuckled and eased the younger man's heavy head off him as he saw their bag approaching.

"You don't think we should have packed more?" Charles questioned, eyeing their one big bag and their two smaller ones.

"I've got another suitcase at my mom's we can use for all your inevitably kitschy souvenirs," he grinned, pulling their bag off the carousel and taking his German phone from his satchel to tell his mother they had arrived.

"Har har," Charles intoned. "Should we go catch the train?"

"Sure," Erik said, more focused on the phone, which kept ringing and finally went to an automated voicemail. He frowned at the piece-it wasn't like his mother not to answer her phone, especially when she was expecting him to call.

He tried again as they left the security area, handing their meager custom's forms to the attendant, only able to frown when Charles wrested the larger bag from him.

"Hey-Erik," Charles gasped suddenly, and Erik jerked to look at him, and then where he was staring in shock. He had one moment to wonder if it was that awful toad woman coming after him for revenge before he was jarred out of all thought by, "Kleiner!" and seeing his mother waving at them from the entry area.

He and Charles exchanged a surprised glance and Charles said, a little shakily, "I thought we were meeting her in Heidelberg! I thought I had more time!"

Erik couldn't think of anything to say to that, only led his boyfriend at a clipped pace to his mother and accosted her in German.

"_Mama! What are you doing here? I told you we'd meet you at home! You didn't have to come all the way out here all by yourself! Something could have happened to you!"_

His mother ignored his tirade completely, hugging him tightly around the middle and then turning immediately to Charles and keening, saying "_Ach, kleiner! He is even more handsome in person! Oh, kleiner Spatzi!" _and taking the man's face in her hands to kiss him on each cheek. Erik imagined this was one of the few times Charles had to lean down to be kissed by someone: his mother was a very small woman, and somehow seemed even smaller this year.

"_Guten Tag, Frau Lensherr," _Charles beamed excitedly in his nervousness, recovered from all fatigue and blushing up to his ears at her hands-on greeting.

Edie gasped and reached out to grip Erik's arm, looking at him with joy. "_And he speaks German! Oh, kleiner!"_

"_Ach, nein, Mama," _Erik groaned, trying to explain. "_Charles just knows a few things."_

Edie gazed up at Charles in rapturous delight and pet his arm admiringly.

"Frau Lensherr-nein," she instructed him, and put her thin hand over her chest. "Mama."

Charles eyed her nervously, glancing at Erik as if to make sure it was okay. With Edie's hand goading him forward he smiled sheepishly.

"Ah, well, ahem, _ja-Mama_."

Erik smiled, blushing a bit himself.

"Okay, okay," he muttered, motioning them forward. "Let's catch the train. _Komm, laß uns gehen, Mama."_

Edie tried to wrestle Erik for his bag, and when that failed she attacked Charles, who was no good at fending off old women and was thus divested of his smaller bag, although he managed to keep a tenuous hold on the larger one.

"Your mum's strong," he muttered to Erik, massaging his arm where Edie had wrenched it going after his bag.

"You just need to man up and shove her back," Erik suggested. Charles squinted at him. God, the man actually thought he was joking...

They had just barely missed the train while buying tickets, and stood off to themselves on the platform so that Edie and Erik could exchange energetic German, each demanding extensive news on each other's health. ("What did you eat on the plane? That's no good-I'll make matzoh when I get you home. You're too thin." "What do you mean you stood on the subway? No one got up for you? You should have made someone get up! Here, sit on the suitcase.") Erik held Charles in the curve of his arm out of habit and tried to ignore his mother's starry-eyed glancings.

When the smaller man leaned against him heavily, resting his head on Erik's shoulder, he realized the man was flagging.

"_Is he tired?_" his mother questioned, looking on in concern.

"_He didn't sleep on the plane."_

"_He seemed so energetic in the airport." _she frowned.

"_He was excited to meet you," _Erik explained.

"Are you talking about me?" Charles murmured, forcing himself to stand on his own and blinking the tiredness out of his eyes owlishly. He seemed to come to the conclusion that this sort of stupor was not what he wanted Edie's first impression of him in person to be made of and stared at her in embarrassed shock. "Oh my- Ich...um...ent...schuldig..." he gave up with a high blush and turned to Erik, tugging on his arm pleadingly. "I'm very very exceedingly sorry."

"_Ich entschuldige mich,_" Erik supplied with a chuckle, proud that Charles repeated it after him instead of letting it stand as if Erik were his own voice box.

Edie keened at his adorable accent and jumped up to clutch him to her side.

"_He is the most adorable Spatzi. I can't wait to get him home and coddle him."_

"_What about me?"_

"_I've got enough coddling in me for the both you," _she argued, flicking her hand at him.

"What is she saying?" Charles asked, glancing between Edie pressed up on his left and Erik on his right.

"She says you're in for the coddling of a lifetime when she gets you to Heidelberg. You're not allergic to coddling are you?"

"I'm not sure, I've never been coddled before," Charles admitted in a sort of daze.

"What are you talking about? I coddle you all the time!"

"No, you dote on me. Only mothers coddle."

Erik mulled that over, shifting the three of them apart as the airport express finally pulled up. Erik knew the analytical facts of Charles' relationship with his mother, and the more emotional bits of it from Raven, but he wasn't sure how much of that was exaggeration. Charles had told him that his mother was rather distant with him after his father died, and Raven had said that she was a neglectful alcoholic nymphomaniac. Erik supposed the truth struck somewhere in the middle, but wasn't sure how _much_ in the middle.

They stored their luggage and settled in for the train ride, Erik acting as grudging intermediary as Edie pumped Charles for information.

"_Ask him what he likes to eat."_

"_Mama, I've been dating him for over a year. I know what he likes to eat."_

"_We shouldn't leave him out of the conversation, though, kleiner," _she insisted, staring at Charles avidly and asking him herself, "_Spatzi, what do you like to eat? Hm?" _miming eating to him to help.

"Ich haben Hunger?" Charles questioned. Edie smiled allowingly but shook her head.

"What do you like to eat? She's bursting at the seams to cook for you," Erik explained.

"Oh, whatever, I'm not picky." Charles waved the question off.

"That's not going to cut it, _Spatzi_. You're going to have to come up with something concrete."

"What does that mean, _Spatzi_? She was saying it, too."

Erik laughed. "It means little sparrow. She must not think we're grown enough. I'm _kleiner _and you're _Spatzi_."

Charles blushed and beamed, a beautiful combination. "She has a pet name for me?"

"It's not quite 'brightness' or 'dove', but I guess it'll do," Erik allowed, and then recognized that this was the perfect opportunity to ask. "Didn't your parents have a pet name for you?" He realized for the first time that Raven's only pet name for the man was a sarcastic 'brother dear' alternated with a caustic 'Know-It-All'.

"My nanny used to call me 'princeling'. I think maybe my father called me 'kitten'." When Erik eyed him curiously he continued. "It was in one of his journals. I don't think we ever had an actual kitten and it was before Raven, so I assumed he was talking about me..."

"_What are you talking about?" _Edie interrupted. "_Did you ask him about the food?"_

"_Ach, Ich hätte es fast vergessen. _Hurry up, she's still pumping me for food information. Just name literally any kosher meal just to fend her off."

"Okay, what about...um...Brathering."

Erik scoffed. "That is not what you want to eat. You looked that up in your travel book."

Charles pouted. "That doesn't mean that's not what I want to eat."

"_Brathering? Is that what he said?" _Edie jumped in.

"_He was joking. He said macaroni and cheese." _It wasn't really a lie, after all: mac and cheese was Charles' go-to food, seldom as he chose to admit it.

Edie beamed, obviously thinking off all the mac and cheese she would be making her new love. Erik smiled likewise, seeing his mother so happy. It was even more apparent outside of Skype: seeing her this happy in person was somehow more impressive than through the computer screen. He moved seats to squeeze in next to her and wrap his arm around, holding her close. She held him back and leaned up to kiss his cheek and pet the hairs at the nape of his neck.

"_Oh, mein Kleiner,"_ she hummed, cuddling into him.

Charles smiled at them thoughtfully and then yanked out his camera and took their picture.

"Cheater, no pictures," Erik growled half-heartedly.

"_Now you two!" _Edie cheered. "_I need more pictures of the two of you." _And she slipped out from under Erik's arm and switched spots with Charles, taking his camera.

She sighed and beamed into the camera screen, glancing up at them as if she were about to cry she was so happy.

"_You two are so handsome together," _she sniffled, taking the picture and wiping her eyes.

"Schoen-doesn't that mean pretty?"

"Hmmm more like handsome. She says we're a handsome couple."

Charles' pulled back to stare at him happily, a faint blush brushing his cheeks before he grinned and kissed Erik's cheek. Edie snapped another picture like a proper paparazzi.

"_Ach, Mama-gib mir die Kamera."_

"_You need some good mothering-you're getting cranky," _she fussed.

"You should be nice to your mother," Charles suggested, and probably would have managed to come up with a few other choice recommendations (he could never stop at just one), but they arrived at Haubtbahnhof and had to get off.

"You two stay here and play charades," Erik suggested on the platform. "I'll go buy our tickets."

Charles nodded, didn't look nervous at all. The man was such an extrovert, even a language barrier couldn't hold him back from interacting with people, especially when those people were Erik's mother.

"Take your time," he grinned back. "I'm going to try and mime 'baby pictures'."

Erik made sure to hurry.

"That was quick, mein Windhund," Charles teased. "But you're too late, I'm afraid."

"You didn't," Erik scoffed. He really had made record time. He had physically shoved in front of a tourist couple to get the goddamn tickets, hadn't even bothered getting Senior fare for his mother.

"It was surprisingly easy-your mother catches on quick."

"_Mama, what have you done?"_

Edie shrugged non-committally. "_It's just a couple. Just what I had on me."_

"It was nice to see that your smile is still cute with no teeth. I've got something to look forward to when we're eighty," Charles teased. It didn't manage to abash Erik since it implied they'd still be together when they were eighty and Erik loved that implication.


	4. Chapter 4

By time they reached Heidelberg Charles had pale blue bags to match his eyes and was visibly wilting although he tried to keep up his energy enough to fawn over all things Heidelberg.

"Oh my goodness! It's so beautiful!" he cried with wonder, trying to suck in every view in one go.

"Calm down before you have a seizure," Erik suggested, trying to keep Charles from fluttering like a hyperactive bird around the station.

Erik knew the frenzy couldn't last: the man hadn't slept a wink on the train despite a tiredness that had about knocked him unconscious. Every time his body slumped with forced sleep it would jerk up again the next moment leaving Charles green in the face.

"Falling asleep in moving vehicles makes me sick," he explained miserably across the aisle and pulled out a book to try and keep himself awake so he wouldn't throw up on his seat partner.

The seats were set up two by two and Charles had put his foot down about Erik and Edie sitting together, lunging into his seat and white-knuckling the handrests to prevent Edie from dragging him out of it. He had finally succeeded after a bitter struggle, and Edie collapsed in exhaustion next to her son.

"_Imagine not letting an old woman have her way! He's as bad as you are!"_

"_He understands that old women shouldn't always get what they want. Especially when they're as masochistic as you are."_

Edie scoffed but eyed his boyfriend with a new sense of embittered respect.

They chatted about other things for a long while, mainly about Irena, Erik's 'aunt,' for lack of a better word. Edie had invited her to go pick Erik up at the airport, and any responsible adult would have taken Edie up on the offer no matter how early it entailed getting on the train just to keep the old woman safe, but Irena had begged off. She hadn't even had the guts to simply say no, feigning a migraine instead. Erik fully considered her a coward and a loafer and wished he could convince his mother to kick her out of this rent-free living situation.

"_You've never met her," _Edie chuckled, rubbing his hand. "_You judge too early."_

"_I judge right on time. Is it my fault I haven't seen her since infancy? She was fine living off her husband till he died, then she decided she could get away with living off you."_

They argued that point for the next twenty minutes before Edie turned the subject to something she probably imagined was more jovial, but was actually just more nerve-wracking. "_Did you ask Charles to move in with you yet?"_

Erik waved her frantically into silence, tossing Charles a look to make sure he hadn't heard any of that. Luckily that particular sentence probably wasn't very legible in English, so he thought he was safe.

He frowned petulantly and said, "_I'll ask him once you tell me __**how**__ to ask him and not before."_

Edie eyed him curiously. "_This I do not understand. Before you were always so impetuous. You'd get an idea and act on it immediately. It was maddening. Now suddenly you're nervous to take any step."_

Erik sighed sadly. It was a true enough assessment of the situation. "_I can't help it, Mama," _he complained. "_Before I never cared. If I did something wrong and it ruined everything it never really mattered. This matters..." _

Edie smiled up at him and her deep brown eyes went watery.

He balked wildly: "_Du mein Guete, Mama!"_

"_I'm sorry. I just...I'm just so happy I get to see you like this. I wish your father were still here, so he could see you so in love..."_

Erik blushed scarlet and patted her hand soothingly.

"_You have to ask him, kleiner. You won't ruin anything. He loves you, too, I know."_

"_Living together doesn't just count on loving each other. If it did we'd have moved in a long time ago. I just...I don't think that he loves me more than his sister. I don't think he'll live with me instead of her," _he admitted bitterly.

His mother nodded understandingly and kissed as far up his frame as she could reach: his shoulder. "_You're too pessimistic. You have to have faith, kleiner. Love is all about faith."_

Erik was disappointed to learn this. Faith had never been his strong-point.

But looking at Charles now, antsy to take in all of his hometown and energetic and beaming, the task felt a little bit easier.

* * *

><p>Erik had always been good with money. He was good at saving and better at investing and even by business school his professor had suggested that he go into investment banking. If Erik had had any interest in earning other people more money he probably would have done it, but as it was his love of money extended only towards his own. And his family's of course.<p>

So all through school he had saved money, speculated and invested and increased his funds, thankful that he could put it towards his own desires and not paying off school thanks to his scholarships. With this blessing, he could set aside some of his money towards owning his own home, and the rest to sending home to Ireland and his parents. It was mostly unnecessary with his father receiving plenty of work in carpentry and various odd-job construction work. At the same time his mother refused to stop her odd-job tailor work, so they were doing very well. They put Erik's money into an airplane fund and with that they were able to fly him home at least once a year. They liked for him to stay home all summer, but once Erik got the internship at the brokerage firm, he had starting coming home for Hanukkah instead, which he preferred.

His money came in handy a lot more when his father died, just as Erik was turning twenty-five. He took time off his work at the time and flew to Ireland for the funeral and helped his mother go through her things. After selling or giving away bits of it, they had put the rest in storage and Erik had moved her out to live with him and Magda while she recovered from the depression of losing the man she had been married to since she was sixteen and had fathered two beautiful children with. Erik had been equally shaken. His father was only fifty-three and, at twenty-five, Erik had not been planning for the contingency of losing a parent. It made his mother all the more precious to him, and if he hadn't had her right at hand to be sure of her health he thought he might have gone mad.

He had loved living with his mother again, partly because he was scared for her and partly because she managed to make him feel so much better. Magda had only responded to the loss of his father with a tirade against patriarchy, and having his mother there to console him saved him any more of Magda's comforting lectures.

But it couldn't last forever. For one, Magda and his mother got along about as well as a cobra and a mongoose. If either of them had been able to understand the other one it probably would have blown up much earlier, but as it was they could only suspect the rudeness of the other. Erik tried to water down his translations as much as possible, too exhausted between work and mourning to intervene completely.

When Irena got a hold of Edie and tried to finagle a way into moving in with Erik and Magda also, the older woman had instead suggested they move back to Germany together. Irena, like her brother, was a Polish-German mix, although she had married a Pole and related much more to her Polish side. Still, she spoke German and was willing enough to follow anyone's plan for her.

Erik had accepted his mother's departure with much bitterness, and had insisted on getting her set up in Germany so that he could at least be sure of her comfort there. Edie had set her foot down on him buying her a house though. She didn't want a house. She wanted their home.

After two years of waiting around, Edie accepted all the money Erik insisted on giving her and had bought out the lease on the same apartment Erik had been born in all the way back in '77.

So it was with a strange sense of vague deja-vu that Erik now looked outside the taxi to see his old apartment building.

They had only lived there until he was ten, but he found that he remembered certain aspects very well.

The bakery on the ground floor was new-the area was much more commercial now. But he remembered the synagogue down the street, and its stained glass windows. The same post office was on the opposite corner, and Erik had a strange moment of wondering if the postal worker who always gave him mints was still there.

He remembered the tree planted in the sidewalk outside the apartment, although it was obviously bigger now, over twenty years later. He was surprised his mother hadn't torn it down herself after it had nearly dropped a complete branch on top of him during a windstorm when he was nine. He remembered the blue and white tiles in the foyer of the apartment building, although he didn't remember the wrought iron bannisters-hadn't they been wood when he was there?

The mail boxes like little doors were still there-he remembered playing house with the little girl from upstairs with those little doors: his astronaut figurine had inhabited 201 and her Indian along with her over-sized black widow (twice the size of the other figurines) had lived in 303, the landlady's actual apartment. Natasha-that had been her name. Or was it Natalie? She had been his first kiss, playing Truth or Dare with the other kids in the neighborhood. She had also been his first French kiss, although at the time they hadn't been sure what that entailed besides tongue and so had mostly ended up licking each other's mouths.

Overwhelmed with memories, he glanced around nearly as much as Charles, and in his distraction he lost his baggage to his mother. In retaliation he wrestled Charles for the bigger bag and won, dragging it up the stairs after Edie.

"When was the last time you were here?" Charles questioned as they made their way up.

"We moved away right before I turned eleven," Erik shrugged.

"This is so exciting! I feel like I should be filming your reaction or something," Charles laughed. Erik tried to roll his eyes but they were too busy taking everything in.

It was beautifully warm inside his old apartment, a stark change from the frigid temperatures of the street, and Erik felt all his muscles relaxing with the heat and the wonderful scent of his mother's home. It smelt just like his childhood: a sweet citrus smell, the spicy kitchen smells, and the soft sort of fabric smell that followed his mother around from her sewing and knitting, all coupled with the gentle scent of freshly-baked bread from downstairs.

"Schoen, Mama," Charles gasped, motioning to the apartment.

Edie blushed and brushed off his compliments with a few self-deprecating words.

After the short entryway was the kitchen on the left and a big closet on the right. Further inside was the living room, hemmed in on the right by a dining room table and chairs. The two doors on the right lead to the bedrooms, Erik knew, and on the left was the bathroom and his mother's all-purpose room for her computer, her sewing, and her knitting.

"_You boys put your luggage in my room-Irena will keep her room and I'll take the couch," _Edie said, motioning them to Edie's room.

Erik stopped in his tracks.

"_Nein, Mama._ _Daraus wird nichts."_

"What's going on?" Charles questioned, stopped up behind him in the foyer.

"We're about to have a Big, German Argument," Erik explained. And then his mother started up and he jumped in, and hoped that Charles knew enough to stay out of it.

Once all the shouting was over, Erik emerged from the rubble to discover that he had essentially won: his mother and Irena would share her queen bed, Charles would take Irena's smaller bed, and Erik would have the couch. He had tried to shove the couch to Irena, but hadn't been so set on it that he couldn't live with the current situation.

"You're taller-you should have the bed," Charles argued as he put their bags in the smaller room on the right.

"Don't you get in on this too," Erik growled. "And the couch is plenty big enough for me."

That taken care of, Edie showed them around the apartment, which really amounted to showing off all the photos she had hanging everywhere. She and Charles seemed to have similar views on architecture in that walls were not in fact for holding up the ceiling but were actually only around to shower with shrines to your family. Erik glanced around at the copious photos himself and let his mother lead Charles through them one by one, offering up translations when they were necessary.

His parent's wedding was obvious enough, Charles could figure that out, but he put his two cents in explaining the naked toddler photo of himself knocking on the neighbor's door. "She says that this was a fluke occurrence with extenuating circumstances and it hardly ever happened and she's surprised they managed to get it on paper at all since it was so fleeting a moment," he explained on top of his mother's insistent German of "_He refused to put on clothes! I couldn't leave him alone for a second or it was naked time all over again-and then, once he could work door handles-he'd just run all over the apartment building naked as a jaybird! I've never seen anything like it!"_

Most of the photos on the walls he recognized from having had them around all his life: baby pictures of him, of his sister who had died young-long before he was born-pictures of his father, of his mother, his grandparents, and any amalgamation of the lot of them. But there were some he was not exactly expecting.

"_Where did you get this?" _Erik questioned, pointing to a picture of him and Charles from Moira's son's birthday party. It was a pristine action shot thanks to Angel: Charles had just gotten Erik straight in the side of the head with a water balloon, soaking his hair even as Erik tried to block the hit and turn away. He was still smiling though, and Charles was absolutely tearful with laughter, although it could have been water: Erik had been soaking Charles to the bone for most of the day, eschewing the water balloons in favor of the garden hose.

"_You emailed it to me," _Edie came over to explain. Charles followed in a moment._ "Michael from upstairs showed me how to print it on photo-paper. It turned out nice, yes?"_

It looked very nice, and Erik scoped out for more in the same vein. They were easy to find when he was looking for them: he just had to be on the lookout for those shining blue eyes.

There was the photo from Charles' birthday, the two of them feeding each other cake sarcastically. There was another that he remembered Raven snapping of Charles curled up on him on the couch. Another was the childhood picture from Charles' office that the younger man had given him for Hanukkah last year and that he had dutifully shared with his mother.

"Hey, that's me," Charles pointed out in shock, staring at his sixteen-year-old self grinning on the beach. Erik wondered why he was just now figuring this out: it had been him four pictures ago with Erik wrapped around his torso, too, but he hadn't balked at that. But then he understood: all the other pictures could be pictures of Edie's son that his boyfriend just happened to be in. This was all Charles, all the way.

"_Du bist Familie," _Edie explained, patting his arm affectionately. Charles didn't need much German skills to work that out and blinked in awe at her before glancing at Erik for certainty.

"Did she...what did she..." he choked out.

Erik smiled a little condescendingly. "You're a smart kid, you know what she said."

"That's," Charles sighed, looking at Edie shyly from under his eyelashes. "Das ist süß, danke."

Edie grinned and reached up to pet Charles' cheek affectionately. Erik was surprised to see the younger man pull away.

"I should call Raven. Tell her I got in okay," the man said, but his voice sounded tight.

"_What did he say?" _Edie asked in surprise as Charles stalked off to the bedroom to get his phone.

Erik shook his head in confusion. Changed the subject to distract his mother from Charles' strange reaction.

"_Wo ist Irena?"_

"_Tante_ Irena," Edie corrected, giving a last lingering glance at the bedroom door before taking Erik into the kitchen to stuff him full of food. "_She's at the doctor's. For her migraine."_

_For her hypochondria, _Erik wanted to correct, but accepted a fresh bagel with some herring spread and cream cheese. He hadn't had herring spread in years. He wondered if he should have warned Charles that he was essentially going to smell of salted fish for the next few weeks...


	5. Chapter 5

"_It might be time to put Spatzi to bed," _Edie suggested after an exquisite meal of home-made matzo soup. Erik came out of the kitchen from washing up to see that the smaller man had collapsed against the arm of the couch. He grinned and went around to the front of the couch to stroke Charles' thick brown hair back, watching his favorite part of the man blinking awake where his blue eyes slowly lit up with consciousness.

"Ready for bed, _Schlafmütze_?" he teased, leaning forward to kiss Charles' cheek. He couldn't resist nuzzling in there a moment before pulling back. When he did he noticed that his mother was watching him starry-eyed and he blushed hard.

"What time is it?" Charles whispered, slipping an arm forward over Erik's shoulder sleepily.

"_Seven_," Erik chuckled. Charles' eyes focused more and he sat up resolutely. He couldn't help but flag slightly under his brow-beating exhaustion, his eyes drooping to half-mast despite his best efforts towards seeming aware.

"No, m'body will get off focus'd. I have't stay up til'least ten," he said, sounding half drunk. What did off focused even mean? In any case, the man's head wobbled on his neck so Erik decided it was not necessary to listen to him. He took the arm still around his shoulders and used it to drag Charles to his feet and keep him there when the man's legs wavered underneath him.

Edie, ever avid for mothering, jumped forward to get the bedroom door for him and ran inside to turn down the freshly-made bed.

"_I hope he'll be okay with these cotton sheets...I can wash the flannel ones tomorrow..."_

"_He'll be fine, Mama," _Erik chuckled, easing Charles fully onto the bed. He started to unbutton Charles' dress shirt and then realized his mother was still there. "_Some privacy, Mama? When did you become such a pervert?"_

"_If you didn't bring home such attractive young men I wouldn't have to ogle them," _she argued, smacking his shoulder before leaving him to his boyfriendly duties.

He knew Charles would be upset in the morning that he hadn't forced him awake enough to brush his teeth, but that was just too bad.

"Whas going on?" Charles murmured, struggling to raise a hand to where Erik was continuing through his buttons. "'Re we having sex?"

Erik laughed and shook his head. "I really hope you remember saying that in the morning, because it's going to be hilarious."

When he was done with the buttons he undid the cuffs and then knelt on the bed for leverage enough to ease off Charles' shirt. After that it was on to pants and socks, and he blushed to find that he could not actually reveal those long legs without laying a caress down them. Charles sighed underneath him, groping a hand around for him and yanking him forward by his shirt for a half-awake kiss which quickly turned into a completely-asleep kiss.

Erik sighed with half frustration and half amusement and pulled back, looking over Charles sleep-slack face and letting amusement take over an extra ten or fifteen percent. Then he untangled Charles' hand from its grip on the front of his shirt and pulled the thick down blankets up to Charles' chin.

"Get some rest, _liebling," _he sighed, laying a chaste kiss on the sleeping man's cheek and heading back to the living room to chastise his perverted mother.

Erik looked at all the dishes he had washed dripping on the drying rack and shifted his weight from foot to foot. Then he frowned and grabbed a hand towel and started drying all the dishes slowly and carefully, feeling immediately better now that he had a plan of action.

Until his mother poked her head in and said, "_Put that down, Erik, and get ready! The girls will be here any minute!"_

Erik knew this very well since it was the sole reason he had been hiding in the kitchen for the last fifteen minutes. When his mother had told him she had plans for them today, he had figured she meant a tourist trip up to the castle or maybe a frigid boat ride or something. He had not thought she meant inviting over all her synagogue friends and showing off her son and his boyfriend, whom Edie had already introduced to Irena as her _Schwiegersohn_.

It had been a late morning getting started, which Erik was surprised but not upset with. He liked the lazy start of the day after so many early mornings and long hours getting the cafe to the point where he could leave it alone for nearly a month. So when ten o'clock rolled around and he was still drinking hot chocolate with his mother on the couch, he was happy.

Although he would have been happier if Charles were around to share it with.

"_Maybe __**you're**__ going to be bad and not let your mother feed you, but I bet Spatzi will let me give him breakfast. Should we wake him?"_

Erik had frowned. On the one hand he very much wanted Charles up and around and bubbly, but on the other hand he very much hated waking Charles up. It always felt so cruel... Really, it was amazing that Charles was still asleep. Maybe at his own house he liked to sleep in but as a guest he was up at the crack of dawn to help do everything from making breakfast to sweeping the floors.

He eyed the hot tea, the fresh bread Uwe from the bakery had brought up, and the konfiture already laid out and unable to be put off any further.

"Okay," he had sighed regretfully and dragged his feet to the door.

The bedroom had heavy drapes and was still dark as dusk, and Charles was stretched out like a pole, cuddled under the heavy blankets with just a tuft of brown hair peeking out from the top. Erik winced miserably and flipped on the light against his will.

Protected by his quilted barrier, Charles stretched even further and grumbled but otherwise didn't stir. Gritting his teeth, Erik sat on the edge of the bed and eased the blankets down to Charles' shoulder, gazing sympathetically as Charles turned and whined and groaned in the light, looking like a drugged mole dragged out to day.

"What'r you doing? Why?" he complained, turning into his pillow.

Erik pet his hair apologetically and leaned down to breathe in the sleepy scent of the man.

"Come on, _Helligkeit_, time to greet the day. Come eat breakfast."

Charles jerked awake beneath him.

"Breakfast? What time is it?" he hissed.

Erik chuckled and backed up because the man was going to flip when he heard. "It's about ten."

Charles made a choked noise and lunged out of the bed but got caught by his legs, toppling to the floor where he caught himself on his forearms, his feet still tangled up in the sheets. Erik yelped and jumped forward, pulling the man back onto the bed by his arms, but Charles didn't stay still long enough to drop him there, kicking his legs free while Erik was still pulling him up and pushing out of the bed using Erik as leverage.

"Why am I naked?" he gasped, lunging around randomly trying to remember where he'd put his luggage.

"You're not naked," Erik laughed, collapsing back on the bed to watch Charles frantically try to get dressed.

"I should take a shower," Charles muttered. Erik pouted. That meant he would be getting dressed in the bathroom and not in front of his boyfriend and Erik disapproved of that.

"You look fine," he tried to persuade.

"_Is everything okay? I heard noises," _Edie claimed, throwing open the door, and getting an immediate and full view of his half-naked boyfriend.

In the present, Erik shook his head and continued to dry the dishes, trying to figure out who had been more shocked: Edie or Charles. Charles had undoubtedly blushed out all his embarrassment in the shower, but Edie hadn't had that luxury and had walked around the apartment in a dazed manner all morning, alternating between smiling awkwardly and fanning herself.

The doorbell broke him out of his reverie, and as Edie opened the door he was immediately bombarded with the loud clucking of the brood storming the entrance. Slowing his task even further, he wished there was a better spot than the kitchen to hide in.

He listened in as Edie led the group in to the living room where he knew Charles was seated helping with the tea. He could tell the ladies of the synagogue had gotten to him when he heard their shrill cries of adoration. Grinning and imagining the drama going on in the other room, he wondered if Charles would have any cheeks left over for him after all their pinching.

Putting the dish he was on back in the rack he slipped out of the kitchen silently. With any luck they'd all be too distracted with Charles to pay him too much mind.

Irena was in the bedroom lying down, which was a blessing because Edie's friends took over every bit of furniture available. They squeezed Charles in four across on the three-person couch, and the others were grudgingly seated on the chairs Edie had laid out, complaining that the couch-girls were hogging all the cuteness.

They were all talking at once, the ones on the couch telling Charles how adorable he was and the ones off it telling the same thing to Edie.

"_He's so handsome! These American types are always so like movie stars_!"

"_He should be on television, he really should! Oh, Edie, this is a good son-in-law_."

One skinny woman sitting nearly in Charles' lap was stroking his hair back and marveling at its sweet curl, saying to him, "_You have to meet my grand-daughter Clara—you two would make a beautiful couple. Oh my goodness!_"

Erik growled and put an end to that right away. "_You just go ahead and leave Clara at home—he's taken._"

That brought everyone's attention to him and the women he knew from childhood jumped up to tell him how much he'd grown and the women he hadn't known jumped up to tell him how much more handsome he looked in real life than in the pictures.

When they had gotten their fill they shoved him down onto the couch next to Charles and pushed the two of them together so they could gauge how much of an attractive couple they made. Apparently it was pretty fair because they all starting clucking and clapping, and then one of them wailed, "_It's such a pity there won't be any babies_!" and they all took up the lamentation: "_A pity! Yes, an absolute pity_!"

"What are they saying?" Charles questioned through his clenched smile.

"They're saying that we're the sexiest goddamn couple they've ever seen in their lives and I need to find a way to impregnate you as soon as possible," Erik replied without breaking his own grin.

Charles stared at him for a shocked second and then slapped him hard on the leg. "You jerk—I believed you!"

"The translation wasn't really far off," Erik defended, holding the man's hand back from further attack. The women cooed in unison at their adorable fighting and Erik had to struggle not to roll his eyes. This was not cute. This was attempted murder.

"_He's feisty_," one of the women said. Erik didn't know who she was, but he agreed with her whole-heartedly.

For as much as some of the women remembered him he didn't recognize any of them. He supposed it had been a very long time ago, and Erik hadn't interacted much with the old women besides begging treats off them.

"_My Agathe will love him_," another woman said. Erik didn't remember her face, but he knew from her name that it was her son, Jack, that he used to sneak cigarettes with in the synagogue bathroom until their mothers caught and thrashed them. He hoped that Agathe wasn't as much of a trouble-maker as Jack was. Then he realized he didn't have to hope any of that because Agathe was never going to love Charles because Agathe was never going to fucking get within ten _feet_ of Charles.

"_The lot of you, leave your daughters where they are: he's mine_," Erik growled again, hoping it would sink in this time when he gripped Charles demonstratively around the shoulders. He could tell by their cheerful gazes that it had _not _sunk in, so he continued. "_Charles is in no way interested in your daughters unless they're actually your sons and even then—he has me. He doesn't need your hand-outs_."

"_Erik—behave_," his mother laughed. "_You too, girls. You're not taking my son-in-law from me."_

"_We'll have your son, then_," Frau Weiβ cackled, reaching over to pinch Erik's cheek. He pulled away, sliding behind Charles' back for protection.

"Keep these perverts away from me," he demanded of his boyfriend.

"If you'll excuse me I think now's a good time to call Raven," Charles sing-songed, standing up.

"You just called her yesterday!" Erik complaining, seeing the women scrunch in closer to him like a pack of ravenous wolves.

"She didn't answer. I'm going to try again while it's early."

Edie didn't know why Charles was leaving but she recognized that he was doing so—she didn't try to stop him but she did force him to pause while she pressed some teacakes into his hand, explaining with a demonstrative prod to his ribs that he needed to eat more.

Erik wasn't quite distracted by the synagogue wolves enough to miss the way Charles' jaw tightened, and he was immensely confused by the fact that Charles hid the treats in the plant-holder before going into the bedroom rather than eat them. He _was _too distracted though to give it the clinical thought it deserved, as Frau Schwartz started showing him pictures of her daughter Lola and daring Erik to have the audacity to say that she and Charles wouldn't have beautiful babies.

He did dare, in spades and when he'd dared himself into exhaustion she dared him to say that _he _and Lola wouldn't have beautiful babies and he was too tired to argue further.


	6. Chapter 6

When the ladies finally left (after another long round of cheek-pinching and womb-pimping) Erik and Charles helped to clean up their mess, racing Edie for the most strenuous tasks and mostly beating her out. Erik did dishes again and Charles wiped the tables, vacuumed up the crumbs from the sandwiches (and, Erik fully suspected, destroyed the evidence of his own hidden teacakes). Edie had to sigh acceptance at the simple task of packing the leftovers, and then promptly unpacking them when Irena fluttered out of her room like a wounded bird (a pelican maybe) and decided she wanted some. Once the woman was fed she claimed the lights were too bright and stumbled back there to lie down some more (and, if the sounds were any sign, watch some trashy day-time TV).

When the chores were done Erik kissed his mother on the cheek and called upon his boyfriendly rights to ruthlessly tourist it up on his and Charles' first real vacation together.

"_Sorry, Mama," _he shrugged, pulling on his coat and wrapping the biggest knitted scarf Edie could find around Charles' throat.

"_Don't apologize—just go cheer him up!"_

The other man did seem a little down since trying to call Raven: she hadn't picked up again. Erik was about ready to fly back just long enough to thrash her.

So Erik went to cheer Charles up. Or try to. The first tourist spot was a flop: the playground Erik had grown up going to was now a parking lot. So they walked down to the Neckar and followed the river along scenically arm in arm, stopping in the park by the river that Erik used to attack ducks at.

"I really hated ducks. No idea why. They were just the dumbest birds. I think I hated them even more than pigeons. Duck came near me? That was fuckin it. It was on. One of us was leaving the goddamn park and it wasn't going to be me," Erik admitted, and Charles had to stop in his tracks and kneel down he was laughing too hard to stand properly.

When the man was recovered they continued on their walk, Erik unable to stop smiling when Charles was beaming so brightly beside him. Effectively cheered up, he would say.

"It's so beautiful here," Charles sighed finally, leaning his head on Erik's shoulder on the down stroke of their steps. "Don't you miss it?"

"I've lived in very beautiful places: here, Killarney, America—our town most of all."

"Really? You think our place is more beautiful than all this?" Charles questioned, sweeping his arm to take in the pale blue hill ridges and sparkling Neckar and cheerfully European buildings.

Erik grinned and tucked a piece of flyaway hair back under Charles' cap, eyeing him affectionately as he said, "Yes. Infinitely."

It was easy to admit to: Heidelberg was gorgeous, but when stacked up against his memories of their town (Charles as they rowed out onto Blue Lake, Charles in his backyard cutting camellias for his desk, Charles' eyes lit up by the Christmas lights on Candy Cane Lane) it simply paled in comparison.

Charles made their city home, and Heidelberg could never be more beautiful than their home.

Speaking of home…

Erik took a deep breath and was promptly interrupted.

"Where are we walking to?" Charles asked lazily, wrapping his arm around Erik's waist.

Erik sighed in frustration but answered him. "Well, we're going to take the Philosophenweg up and around and down to the Alte Brücke. We should make it there by dark, and then we'll get to see the castle lit up."

"Are we going there today?"

"I wasn't thinking so. I thought we could do that and the Schlossruine tomorrow while it's light out. Is there anything _you _want to do? Hmm? Anything your travel book tells you I have left out?" he teased. Charles was a manic traveler: he had checked out three different travel books on Germany in the last two weeks and had frazzled himself to the bone trying to memorize them all on top of his playful book of Jewish traditions and Erik's makeshift German lessons.

"As a matter of fact," the man started up defensively.

As Erik turned the man onto the Bergstraβe and then right to the Philosophenweg onward up to the start of the official hike, he got to hear all about the matter of fact: the Market Square, Old Town, the student prison, the Church of the Holy Ghost. And the zoo.

"I draw the line at the zoo," Erik growled.

"You were a child here! What could you possibly have against the zoo?"

"I had a bad experience," Erik muttered as they hiked, unwinding his scarf in the dual heat of their climb and his embarrassment. That was the most downplayed way of explaining the time Wolf von Strucker, that inestimable asshole, shoved him over the barrier of the seal exhibit during the class fieldtrip and he'd nearly drowned. Even thinking of it now he wanted to shove some more metal bits into his old water balloons and go after that jerk once again.

Charles was surprisingly incapable of leaving it at that considering how many times he left it at that for his own stories of trauma, so by time they were breaking off the path to wind their way down to the bridge the man had the whole story out of him.

"Oh, darling," the bundled brunet murmured into his bare throat, forcing them to stop as he hugged Erik for all he was worth. "You don't need to worry about that," Pulling back, the man stared into his eyes lovingly. "If you fall in again I'll jump in after you and save you, I promise."

"I didn't _fall in_—I was _pushed_! The boy was trying to _murder me_!" Erik snarled shrilly, pulling out of Charles' affectionate grip. The other man only laughed and held his hand tightly through their gloves. Erik huffed but allowed it.

"You're not the least bit angry that some kid was trying to kill me? What if he'd succeeded, eh? Who would you date then?"

"Oh, I wouldn't date anyone, of course. I'd die a horny old spinster. _Here lies Charles F. Xavier, buried with his well-used vibrator."_

Erik couldn't help it, he snorted on his own laughter and slapped Charles' arse through their heavy layers in punishment. "You sex-freak," he chortled.

"Only for you, love," Charles replied easily, not affected at all these days by the moniker. That kind of resilience steeled Erik's half-hearted resolve.

"Okay, okay, we can go to the zoo. But we're giving that seal exhibit a fucking wide berth."

"Deal, darling," Charles cheered, kissing his cheek warmly.

After a long day of sight-seeing he and Charles collapsed back into the homey warmth of the Weisser Bock and started peeling off winter gear. Passing it on their way back to the bridge Erik had immediately recognized it as the nicest restaurant he had known as a child. He had always said he'd get married there (why his ten-year-old self had wanted to get married at all, in a restaurant much less, was beyond him, but he'd been serious enough about it to drag Natalie there under a white sheet and ask the proprietor if he'd do the honors), and he pulled the two of them inside.

The place was packed but quaint, and Charles had bonded with the hostess immediately because the woman spoke broken English. They were now inestimable bosom buddies, to the point that the woman was hugging his boyfriend.

Erik kicked his ankle under the table to let the man know that he was in no way okay with this, and the smaller man flinched but forbore.

"Danke, Effi—ein Sekunde, bitte," Charles requested, motioning to their menus.

"Oh, German very cute—good German," she cooed, running her motherly plump hands over Charles' hat hair affectionately. Erik cleared his throat and glared at her but she ignored him. "Gluhwein Mama Effi bring,_ ja? Ja_. Good Karl. _Ich bin sofort wieder da!_"

When the woman left Erik didn't bother to open his menu, only stared at Charles across the table assessingly, with a faint smile.

"What?" Charles laughed. Erik shook his head and sighed.

"Even in Germany! Even with a language barrier! Even thousands of miles away from home you manage to woo random strangers!"

Charles shrugged nonchalantly. "It'll take a lot more than bringing me to exotic locales to make me change who I am," he sniffed.

Erik rubbed his face disbelievingly but couldn't stop smiling.

"God but I love you," he sighed passionately. Charles jerked his eyes up to stare at him delightedly.

"I—I love you, too," he grinned, reaching across the table and holding his hand. Erik leaned his forehead against the grasp for a moment and then kissed his knuckles before letting him loose. His heart was thrumming painfully in his chest and he wanted to hold Charles close to him, touch him all over and grasp him tighter than he'd ever clutched someone, because he'd never needed someone the way he needed Charles, not to survive but to live.

"What brought all that on?" Charles asked mistrustfully over his menu.

"What do you mean? I always love you," Erik grinned sharkily.

Charles looked at him appraisingly, as if trying to figure out his secret, but smiling like it was a sweet secret. "Not like _that_: not like it's breaking your bones."

Erik pressed their ankles together under the table and smiled back gently. "No, I always do love you like that."

Charles blushed and went back to studying his menu, pressing his leg back against Erik's sweetly.

After such a long active day Erik didn't think he'd have any trouble falling asleep. He hardly ever had trouble falling asleep, after all. Why would he start now? But as soon as he climbed into his makeshift bed on the couch and closed his eyes he could tell that he was not going to be so lucky tonight.

He struggled at if for a few more minutes, most of it spent with his mind racing trying to figure out what could have skewed his abilities. Was it all that Gluhwein Effi had pushed on them? One would have thought that would help him sleep. Was it that passionate 'goodnight kiss' Charles had instigated when they were getting ready for bed? That sounded more likely, but he felt mostly sorted out now, and he hadn't lost any sleep to blue balls before, and he'd certainly been driven to worse levels of it by his sultry boyfriend.

Without coming to a consensus he stared at the ceiling for long stretches of time doing what he always did the one rotten day out of the year he couldn't sleep: cataloguing the various house noises around him. It was his go-to response in hope that the boring task would drive his mind fleeing into sleep to avoid its continuance but there was no such luck now. He could hear Irena's piggy snoring and the dim sounds of cars on the streets, the bell of someone's bike-who rode a bike this time of year in this type of climate? And he could hear the squeaking of Charles' bed as the man flipped and flopped as violently as ever.

He grinned, imaging what he would be doing if there were a comfortable way to fit two grown men into that bed. Probably dodging kicks, or at least attempting to. He'd probably have gotten a flung knuckle to the face by now, but that had its perks as it came with ample apologies and kisses and coddling.

No, _doting_, he corrected himself. Apparently coddling was a mother-and-child action, at least in Charles' mind.

He spent the next indeterminable amount of time wondering about that, about Charles' ideas of mother-and-child and how he had come by them. The man had long ago given Erik an extremely vague outline of his childhood and his childhood relationships, and then spent the rest of their relationship so far slowly filling in the gaps. Erik had come to accept the man's aggravating method of imparting information: start out with the vaguest estimation possible, and then spend the rest of your life doling out details as hesitantly as possible.

So on their first date he had found out that both of Charles' parents had died (and then promptly lost that knowledge to alcoholic haze, regaining it again weeks later when Charles referenced it). A month in, he found out that Charles' father was Brian Xavier, the famous physicist (he hadn't known he was famous, Hank had told him). Two weeks after that he discovered that Charles didn't actually remember his father at all, even though the man had died when Charles was already four-Charles felt inestimably guilty about this. After that he was told that Charles' mother, Sharon, had been very depressed after Brian's death. She didn't like motherhood: that was Brian's deal. He was the one that had wanted children, enough to adopt Raven when Sharon found out she couldn't have any more children of her own.

After that the information was slow to come because it became so much more personally dour to Charles.

That was one sure way to tell how much a memory had hurt Charles: how long it took him to tell you about it. It was only in September or October that Charles had explained he technically had a step-father and step-brother out there, but he wasn't in contact with them. It was another night of pulling to teeth to discover that Kurt had 'rather disliked' Charles, and Cain had felt the same, only 'rather more so'. Raven was the one to explain that that meant Kurt hurled an ever-varying litany of incredibly cruel words at him, and Cain had simply hurled fists. When Cain sent him to the hospital with a gushing head wound (that explained the scar at his temple his hair only barely couldn't cover), Charles and Raven had gone to live with their fraternal grandfather for the summer. Sharon hadn't put up a fight during the whole process, and in fact when Charles came back to complete his schooling she banned him from the premises for 'causing a ruckus and getting poor Cain sent off to counseling'.

During the school year, Papa Xavier put the lives of his grandchildren in the hands of his only son's friend and closest colleague, Dr. Alexander Ryking, and the man had doted on them. A widower with a grown son, he enjoyed their company immensely, although Charles rather thought that, having a son of his own already, the man had naturally grown rather closer to Raven. In the summers they went back to their grandfather and his extensive estate in the Lakes District. He died when Charles was eighteen. As his sole relation, the brunet inherited the estate and respectable fortune. The house was now a museum and had been featured in the latest BBC rendition of Jane Eyre.

Sharon died, most likely of complication arising from untreated alcoholism, when Charles was nineteen. She hadn't spoken to him except through lawyers since they had waited for the ambulance together after his ghastly head-wound. She had told him to please cover up because the sight of his blood was making her nauseous. Then she called the governess, Miss Jo, and went to 'lie down'. That had been when he was seventeen.

Sighing, Erik turned onto his side and realized he had thought much more depressingly than he had meant to. He had only meant to analyze Charles and Sharon's relationship. Instead he'd gotten into their whole seedy past. Charles would just die if he could read his mind, going over all these miserably sordid details. If anyone were to write his posthumous biography (and there was already talk of it in certain fanboy circles despite Charles' ongoing pulse) and include these facts the young professor would undoubtedly come back from the dead just to squash the project. He could normally attain disdain without hurting his gentle sensibilities, tops, but he found it in him somewhere to downright _hate _sordid details.

Erik decided he absolutely had to stop his brain from going over these facts before Charles randomly developed psychic abilities and caught him in the act.

So he turned on the lamp behind him and scrounged around for a book, finally settling on his father's tattered old tome of Irish poetry. Jakob loved all things Ireland-had even named his daughter Eire although it banned him from having a say in future children's names such as Erik's own. He had dragged his whole family there although Edie didn't speak a word of English and had no interest in learning one. The man had even insisted on being buried there, saying only that his heart belonged to Ireland. "You didn't marry Ireland, you married me," Edie had argued back heatedly. "That's my heart you're talking about burying in some potato farmer's back yard!"

Erik had only been reading for a moment or two when he heard Charles' metal bed squeak loudly and looked up to see the younger man stumble out of the room grumpily.

"What's the matter, _Mausi?" _he teased quietly, assuming the man was up for a cup of water to offset his drunkenness. Instead of stumbling to the kitchen or the bathroom, though, the man stumbled to him, kneeling down by Erik's chest and leaning down across him, resting his head on Erik's ribcage.

Erik didn't complain, just laid his head back and stroked Charles' hair across his skull, scraping the skin gently with his blunt fingernails. Shivering slightly, the smaller man slipped his arms under the covers against Erik's stomach and allowed his boyfriend to tuck the quilt around his shoulders.

"I couldn't sleep I guess," he sighed as Erik tickled the nape of his neck with his fingertips.

"Me neither," Erik admitted with a whispering laugh. Charles turned his head so he was looking up at Erik and smiled when Erik moved to run his fingertips over Charles' cheek and brow. The man smiled but shivered, too. "It's too cold to sit there. Climb in."

"I won't fit," Charles argued with a yawn, but Erik wasn't taking no for an answer. He found that if he took the cushions off the back of the couch it gave them just enough room, assuming they both lay on their side. They didn't though. Instead, Charles collapsed halfway on top of Erik, tangling their legs under the heavy quilts and cuddling up to him like his own Siamese twin.

Erik twisted his left arm around the brunet so that he could manage to continue stroking his hair back, turning his head to lay sleepy kisses there as well. Charles, for his part, stroked Erik's ribs through his T-shirt gently and nuzzled into his shoulder with a contented sigh.

"Did those old women really want you to impregnate me?" he mumbled. Erik couldn't help but laugh, but tried to keep it quiet.

"Well, they wanted us to have babies, and that's the only way it's going to happen."

"_I_ could impregnate _you_," Charles argued, either still drunk or quickly falling asleep against Erik's warmth.

"With these slim hips? I'd never survive labor."

Charles hummed displeasure and squeezed his hips affectionately.

"What were you reading?" he murmured, his lips brushing against Erik's chest as he spoke.

Erik had forgotten about his book but glanced at it again, reading whatever was at the top of the page in his most Irish of voices:

"_How many loved your moments of glad grace,_

_And loved your beauty with love false or true,_

_But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,_

_And loved the sorrows of your changing face_;"

Charles rolled up onto his elbow to stare at him and Erik stared back, equally shocked that the random spot he had chosen would be romantic enough to make his bones ache for how much he felt that sentiment towards the man in his arms.

Charles apparently felt likewise, based on the ardent way he kissed Erik's lips, the way his hand gripped Erik's shoulder like he'd hold on forever.

"You goddamn Irish seductress-surely you don't expect me not to shag you senseless after a stunt like that," he panted.

"I'm afraid I do. I've gotten through my entire life without my mother once walking in on me having sex and I want to die with that accomplishment."

"That'll be easy because you're going to die from lack of sex on this very trip," Charles groused, collapsing back to Erik's side but still holding him tightly around the waist so he couldn't have been too wrathful. "And you're going to drag me to the grave along with you."

"It's been all of two days. I think we'll survive a while longer," Erik chuckled.

"Not with lines like that we won't," complained Charles, yanking the book away from Erik's grasp and hiding it under the couch cushions. Erik suspected the man was going to clutch the passage to his breast long enough to imprint the words there eventually, but he didn't attempt to prevent that feat.


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: Just wanted to respond to Lilith, who asked if Mutti would at all reference the Tom story, since that takes place six months before this (give or take). The short answer is: . The fact of the matter is I want that story to contain all of my drama and this story to contain all of my fluff, so really I'm trying to keep them as mutually exclusive as I can manage, which seems to be working since it's not something Erik or Charles would probably want to talk about during their happy holidays! Or at least that's how I'm choosing to think of it!

And now: on to the story!

* * *

><p>Erik woke up very slowly, dragged by degrees to the feeling of Charles in his arms and fingers threading through his hair. He sighed contentedly and held the man tighter, and then knitted his brow as his sensory system started to compile a picture of the position he was in. Because that picture included both of Charles' hands fully occupied: the one curled between their chests and the other resting on the small of his back.<p>

Then who the fuck was petting his hair?

He threw his eyes open to find out just that and was met with his mother staring down at him so closely that he yelped and flailed, toppling both him and his poor confused boyfriend onto the floor.

Charles started shouting trying to figure out what was going on and Edie jumped in shouting her apologies and Erik had to join in to shout his remonstrances and all in all it was the most traumatic morning Erik had had since Raven drunkenly mistook their bedroom (and bed) for her own.

Erik glared at Edie over breakfast (coffee for him, actual food for everyone else) for scaring the shit out of him, Charles glared at Erik for pitching him violently onto the floor, Edie glared at Erik for being mad at her, and Irena glared at everyone for doing drastic things to her blood-pressure apparently.

"_We're going to the castle today," _he told his mother gruffly over dishes.

"_Will you be back for lunch?"_

"_I'm not sure. It's up to Charles."_

"_If not, maybe I could come and meet you for lunch somewhere."_

"_Keep your handy on you, I'll call when I know what we're doing,"_ he said, kissing the top of his mother's head. He might have had a bad morning but they had a rule about never parting angry. After his father had died so suddenly it was a quirk of theirs to treat every goodbye as something more permanent.

"_Ich leibe dich, alle beide," _his mother waved from the front door.

"_Ich liebe dich auch, Mama," _Erik replied. He nudged Charles so the man could respond in kind also, but the man apparently didn't understand what Erik was doing and didn't say anything.

Erik walked his boyfriend over to the Kapellenweg stop to catch the tram and they arrived just in time to see it pulling away. Erik glaring at the electronic screen that said _Nachste Strassenbahn Ankunft 7 Minuten,_ willing it to count down faster, they sat down to wait for the next one.

Charles was pressed in close to his side against the bitter cold despite how much Erik had forced him to bundle up before they left.

"How do you say 'how are you' in German?" the man asked. Erik frowned, looking around the empty tram stop. His mind wasn't really ecstatic about German lessons so early in the morning.

"_Wie gehts es Inhen_," he replied nonetheless.

"And how do you say 'I'm fine, thank you'?"

Erik wondered how long it would take Charles to get tired of this.

"You can say _'Danke, gut_'."

Charles reached across himself and laid his gloved hand on Erik's thigh for warmth and pressed even closer and when he spoke again he was murmuring straight against the skin behind Erik's jaw.

"How do you say 'fuck me'?" he hissed, making Erik's heart fully stop. His brain too apparently, because he couldn't come up with anything.

"Erik?" Charles murmured, massaging his hand into the narrow channel between Erik's legs. "Well?"

"Fu-um-_fick mich_," he gasped.

Charles tossed his free arm around Erik's shoulders, grasping him close and nuzzling in even closer, hotter. When the man licked his lips he grazed Erik's throat and made him shiver hard.

"How," he gasped. "How do you say 'Oh _god_," his voice breathy and shrill " 'fuck me _harder'_."

"_Charles_," Erik growled breathlessly, cock trapped miserably against the seam of his jeans which really hadn't seemed so cruelly _tight_ just a few minutes ago.

"Oh my, German really is much more succinct than I had imagined!" Charles pulled back to tease cheerfully. "I never knew my name meant something so _filthy_. It makes sense now that I've grown up to be such an utter sexual deviant."

Erik still wasn't walking properly when they stepped off the cable car at the castle and probably had a pained expression in all of the pictures Charles insisted on taking. He was surprised there was any space left on the memory card after all the snapshots from yesterday (which had included everything from a view of the city at sunset to multiple close ups on garden gnomes and street signs and shot after shot after shot of Erik). The people on the tram had given him strange stares, he was sure of it, and they hadn't let up when he moved onto the bus. This was all Charles' fault and he didn't understand how he was supposed to have a fun day sight-seeing with a man who continuously got a kick out of giving him blue balls.

Then again, he suspected this was simply thrilling revenge for Erik himself technically turning the man down last night.

The worst part of it was that Charles managed to look so cheerful about it, doing his same fluttering bird routine as at the train station, bounding around the castle photographing everything that moved and plenty of things that didn't. He dragged more tourists into taking pictures of the two of them together than Erik could count, and that was before they even started on the tour inside the castle itself. How anyone could have this much fun in what was essentially a big outdoor lobby (and in the freezing December weather at that) was absolutely beyond him, even after having more than a full year to accrue data on how Charles managed to have fun with normal everyday activities.

The tour guide was some young girl that looked even younger and acted even older: Erik assumed she was probably in her twenties even though she appeared to be a teenager and glared them all down as if she were a ninety-year-old prison warden.

When she called the group together she gave them all a healthy looking over as if X-raying them for possible shank material, pausing with confusion when she got to Charles' beaming smile. She was probably just as baffled by the man's ever-cheery demeanor as Erik continued to be, but at least Erik had been allowed a year to grow accustomed to the bafflement.

She went over the rules of the castle in German, and then repeated herself in an English that was less than perfect but so confidently spoken that it brooked no room for critique or correction. They would not stray on their own, they would not use flash photography, and they would not touch _anything_. The 'on pain of death' was left out, probably because it was redundant after the way she glared at them.

"She seems to really love being here," Charles murmured to Erik as the tour got underway and sounded so authentic that only month after month of intimate study allowed Erik to know that the man was in fact being facetious.

Erik didn't catch the girl's name, wasn't sure if she'd ever given it, but started thinking of her as Dour Wench. He was once again thrilled that Charles could not in fact read his mind because he was sure to get smacked over that. Really, though, he couldn't help what his brain decided to name people, could he? He had to give her some kind of moniker, didn't he? He couldn't just think of her as Murderous Girl In Charge of the Tour for the rest of the day.

So they followed the Dour Wench through the very important gates that Erik had been through more times than he could remember only because he had been so young at the time that all memories sort of bled into one. He tried to ignore the copious clicking of cameras all around him, especially Charles'. Tourists were the reason he preferred to look at monuments through the computer screen.

"Do cheer up, darling," Charles suggested, taking his picture. "I think we'll have lots of fun!" Erik didn't bother to point out that Charles probably also thought they'd have fun at customs or the DMV or getting their teeth cleaned. But he had brought Charles to Germany to enjoy his fucking hometown and enjoy it he damn well would. So he smiled brightly at the man, no mean feat, wrapped his arm around his waist, and allowed Dour Wench to drag them around wherever she would and try to put a dampener on how much he loved every single god damn miserably tourist moment with this man if she thought she could.

The tour was about half done when Charles stopped taking photos beside him long enough to go completely rigid and cry, "Oh my god! My cell phone! I left it in the taxi!"

Erik just stared, along with everyone else, as the man apparently went into paroxysms of anxiety over a cell phone he didn't have, lost inta Taxi they hadn't taken.

"_What's going on?_" Dour Wench doubled back to snarl at them. Erik put a comforting arm around Charles' shoulders and explained the situation to her: this young man had lost his cellphone. They'd have to go back and get it. Were their tickets for the tour good all day?

"_You can't go back alone,_" Dour Wench balked.

"_That's fine, you can escort us and leave all these _actual _tourists alone in the castle._"

They glared each other down steadily and Dour Wench apparently found him a worthy adversary. "_You from Heidelberg?_" she asked.

"_Ja_."

"_What about him_?"

"_I'll keep him in line. No Brit is going to mess around with my national monument,_" he said, imbuing his voice with enough intense national pride to hopefully assure the girl that he wasn't going to graffiti anything. .

Dour Wench gazed the both of them over appraisingly, and then did the same to her tour group, seeming to decide which she would rather have roam the castle on their own.

"_You know the way back to the entrance?_"

"Mach keine Scherze!" Erik scoffed. _You're joking!_ "I've lived in Heidelberg all my life! I know this castle like my own mother's face!" And he turned on his heel, dragging the distraught Charles beside him back the way they came.

"Stay on the path!" Dour Wench called to them and Erik gave her a dismissive wave of understanding.

"I'm really rather surprised that worked," Charles said cheerily, allowing them to turn the corner but immediately breaking Dour Wench's rules by leading them into a closed-off bedroom. Normally it was part of the tour, Dour Wench had said, but it was under renovation at the moment and they should please keep walking.

"This is why you faked hysterics for a twenty year old? You want to see a medieval bedroom?" Erik scoffed.

"Something like that," Charles shrugged, pressing something into Erik's palm. He looked down and saw it was a bottle of lube.

* * *

><p>Charles refused to let them use the bed out of posterity's sake. He wanted to get off in a famous monument, not deface antiques. Erik liked beds. Beds kept him from jamming a knee bad enough to limp for a week. So he argued up until the point where Charles shook the bed frame and showed off its incredible noise and weakness.<p>

"Okay, okay, I get it! Keep it down!" he hissed

Charles smiled brightly with the joy of being proven right and Erik continued in a growl, "Well where are we going to do this thing then?"

Charles' smile widened and he walked to the wall beside the bed, leaning forward into it and tilting his hips back, spreading his legs.

When he had made his cock-aching impression he looked back over his shoulder to his gobsmacked boyfriend.

"_Fick mich, Katchzen_," he sighed, rolling his hips and stopping Erik's heart.

Sliding into Charles always felt like coming home, and Erik was pleased to see that even thousands of miles from their actual home that feeling hadn't changed-indeed, he was sure he felt it more so now than _at _home. The tight clench of that body, the soft sighing of Charles' voice, the way his fingers gripped into any available surface: it was all beautifully familiar and Erik wasn't sure if the sight was more cozy or sexy to his mindset, or maybe the two weren't mutually exclusive.

He wondered if Charles felt this same wave of wondering belonging when the man was pushing into him; and then the brunet was sighing his name and pushing back onto him, coiling his hips, glancing over his shoulder with a bright blue eye and Erik couldn't think of anything except how he was going to move that sigh into a scream.

The noise of a passing tour group reminded him why what wouldn't be a great idea, and he leaned across Charles' spine to breathe into his shoulder, "I'm going to fuck you until you go mad from my cock and you're going to keep that sweet voice of yours down, now, aren't you love?"

"Erik?" Charles murmured quietly.

"Yes?" he hummed back, nuzzling into his hair.

"Are you going to move that cock of yours already or am I supposed to go mad from it just sitting there?"

First order of business: definitely make him pay for that kind of cheek.

When Charles was trembling, when it was everything he could do to hold himself together, when he could scarcely string enough braincells along to remember that he should be _muffling _those cries, Erik dragged his mind away from his cock long enough to come up with a truly inspired bit of mastery. He decided to kill two birds with one stone, feeding into Charles' love of exhibitionism and his deep-seated hard-on for dirty talk in one fell swoop.

"Charles," he hummed, stroking his hand over the man's bare stomach. His only response was a moan that undulated with each slide of his shaft inside the Brit.

Erik leaned in close to make sure Charles could hear him, speaking directly into the shell of his ear but refusing to slow his thrusts.

"Can you imagine... if someone were to ...walk in here right now? Maybe part of the tour...a whole group of sightseers ...watching me fuck you mindless."

Charles moaned loud, tossing his head petulantly and struggling to push himself back more fully onto that damnable rod.

Erik pulled away farther, holding Charles by the hips to control how much grinding the man could manage. He reached up and scratched his blunt nails along Charles' spine from his shoulders down to his hips and grinned at the squeak it produced.

He continued with as much breath as he could manage, "They could see you gasping for my cock, spearing yourself on me, begging for me to touch you." He inched his hand down, gripping the inside of Charles' thigh but dutifully ignoring the man's aching erection.

"Please," Charles choked on cue. "God, please Erik, _please_."

"I wonder what they'd say when they caught you writhing on my cock," he mused, leaning into Charles' spine again and snapping his hips hard enough to make Charles yelp. "They'd say, 'Fuck him harder, Erik. Really ream him out. That sweet ass can take it. Fuck him till he screams your name'_."_

"What the hell kind of tourists are these?" Charles trilled.

Erik ignored him. "Okay, ladies and gentlemen. I'll follow your advice." And he fucked him hard, fully reamed him out, until Charles came screaming his name, muffled against his palm to prevent the whole castle from coming running insomuch as he could manage it.


	8. Chapter 8

Erik was still exhausted from their fairly illegal activities long after they'd left the castle, and didn't understand how Charles could be worked over that hard and still want to sightsee all day.

"What do you mean nap?" the Brit balked over beers (in "OMG an authentic German pub!" He just rolled his eyes when Erik explained that first off they were Bierhauses and second off they were all authentic because they were all in Germany).

"Aren't you tired?" Erik grumbled from where he was literally lying on the bar half asleep. "Mama will make us lunch and then we can cuddle up all nice and warm and nap and then after dinner I'll take you to the Christmas market, I swear."

"But Erik!" Charles cried as if he had suggested they have fresh baby brains for snack. "We're only in Heidelberg for another ten days, and there's still so much to see!"

"Like what?" Erik huffed.

"Well we rather skipped out on that trip to the castle, so we'll certainly have to have another go at it-I was thinking after dark would be very pretty. There's still the old university and the Christmas market (and that'll take at least a couple days) there's the zoo, the castle ruins, Saint's Hill, Heiliggeistkirche, St. Michael's Monestary, and-"

"Please," Erik begged, beat down by the mere mention of all these ridiculous tasks. "No more."

"Really, Erik! I can't believe you'd want to stay inside in such gorgeous weather anyway!"

Erik shook his head in amazement. How was overcast and negative below equaling gorgeous these days?

"Unless the next thing on your list is the Museum of Sleep, I'm out," Erik grumbled.

"Fine," Charles shrugged. "I'll go by myself."

"You'll get lost!"

"My travel guide has a map. Give me your mum's address and I'll take a taxi back when I'm done."

But the thought of setting Charles free on the streets of Germany with no way to contact him should something happen was too terrifying for thought.

"Mom wanted to come out for lunch, she'll be happy to go sight-seeing with you."

Charles seemed shocked-actually, he seemed slightly scandalized. "Alone? You want me to sightsee with your mother _alone_?"

"Since you'll be with my mother, you won't be alone."

Charles took a long swig of his beer and kept staring at it even when he was finished.

"I don't want to inconvenience her. I'll be fine on my own," he insisted.

"It'll be a good chance for you two to spend time together," Erik pointed out.

That didn't seem to make Charles feel any better, even though Erik had said it expressly to make him feel better.

"I don't speak German and she doesn't speak English, what are we supposed to do?" he argued sharply.

"Hey," Erik balked, sitting up and brushing Charles' hair back. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Charles said with a blushing glance.

"Okay...I'll just call my mom and have her take a taxi here, then I'll take it back to her place. Where do you want to take her? I'll make sure she knows how to get there."

"I don't know," Charles said indifferently.

"Check your book," he suggested before getting his handy out and dialing up his mother.

Edie refused to take a taxi, balking at the expense even though the chances of Erik letting her pay for it were nonexistent, so they waited at the bar for her to arrive via bus. It still didn't take that long, and Erik helped Charles figure out where to bring Edie while they nursed another beer. The man's heart didn't seem especially in it.

"_Was ist los?_" Erik questioned, putting his arm around the man's shoulders and pulling him into his neck. Charles wrapped both arms around Erik's slim waist.

"I-oh, I'm just thinking of Raven again," he said, rubbing his forehead against Erik's neck.

Erik grimaced into his hair. How did that girl manage to make her brother upset from thousands of miles away?

"Why? What did she say when you talked to her?"

"She's still not answering my calls. Logan says she's alive though, so there's that," the man sighed. Damn it, Erik would have to deal with this. He had been hoping to keep the secret a little longer and wasn't entirely sure he'd have to give it away yet assuming he could bend Raven to his will by pure intimidation, which he wasn't confident in. She seemed to vacillate between casually ignoring his ire and grudgingly following orders. Hopefully he'd be able to _guilt _her into answering her brother's calls.

Erik couldn't plan his attack too thoroughly right then though because Edie walked in.

She stared between them for a moment and then clapped her hands excitedly.

"_Erik! Did you finally ask him?_" she cheered.

"_Was? Mama, what are you talking about?_"

"_You didn't ask him to move in with you yet? I thought for sure...He just looks like you asked him to move in with you..._"

"_Achtung, Mama: stop saying that!_"

"_What, he's going to suddenly learn German?_"

Erik narrowed his eyes at her and glanced at Charles, who certainly seemed clueless enough but the man was a good actor.

"_He's crafty, Mama. You have no idea..._"

"_Well we're going to have the whole afternoon together so I'll get some idea!_" Edie said ecstatically, bounding forth to wrap her arms around Charles. She pulled the man from his seat and shifted him to the entrance, calling behind her "_There's lunch in the fridge! The key's under the mat! Stay safe!"_

Erik paused his mother in her kidnapping long enough to kiss his boyfriend goodbye, and tried to figure out why Charles looked as if he were being lead to his death instead of a fun afternoon of touristing it up...

* * *

><p>Charles and Edie were back by dinner loaded down with knickknacks and food from the market apparently, including cinnamon cookies for Erik. His mother looked cheerful enough so he assumed they had had a fun time although Charles looked a little wane, like he did after benefactor's dinners or high society parties. He considered cheering the man by telling him that his sister had seen the error of her ways (or the nearest approximation Erik could manage), but decided against it on the hypothesis that copious coddling could move the man out of his funk without his sister's help.<p>

Erik had called Azazel as soon as he got back to his mother's and the man answered the phone with a furious "Do you have any idea what time it is? It's my one day off you jerk!"

"Put Raven on the phone," he had replied easily.

"What are you talking about? Raven's not here."

"Don't play dumb with me I'm not her brother-just put her on."

"She says she doesn't want to talk to you."

"I just bet she doesn't. Put her on or I'm snitching the two of you out to Charles."

There was muffled talking on the other line and then Raven in her regular bored voice.

"I'm sorry, Raven can't come to the phone right now because SHE'S FUCKING PISSED OFF AT YOU, YOU _BASTARD_!"

Erik winced, pulling his ear away from her shriek and when he recovered enough to come back it was Azazel on the line again.

"I hope you're happy," the soft-voiced man growled. "I very much did not need that this early in the morning."

"She's really going to regret being this awful to Charles, and me for that matter, when she finds out about Paris."

"Why don't you just say?" Azazel asked, using enough awkward wording to make sure Raven didn't find out from him. Erik was blessed to have a manager devoted enough to Erik's secrets to not let a pair of knockers induce him to blab.

"There's still a week and a half until then; she'll let it slip. She's not used to having secrets from Charles, she wouldn't last a day. No way; that's the last resort."

"I think we're at that last resort: she hasn't spoken to her brother for three days. She's approaching critical instability and I can't image that Charles is far behind her. They normally manage about twenty minutes without speaking. At this rate they'll have simultaneous nervous breakdowns, and then where will your swell German vacation be?"

Erik gnashed his teeth with ire. He could only assume that since Raven was not screeching in the background complaining about being accused of impending female hysterics she was not in the room any longer.

"Well what am I supposed to do? If I tell her she'll blab to Charles for sure!"

"Since I am much smarter than you, I have already thought of a solution to your problem: She'll email Charles, explaining that her phone is broken, and I'll proofread her emails to make sure they don't divulge anything."

Erik glared at his phone.

"With my luck and her secrecy skills she'll post it on Facebook for all the world to see before the day is out! What am I supposed to do if she lets the cat out of the bag regardless? It's not like I'll be able to cancel her ticket once Charles knows about it."

"If she lets it slip then you get to throw her off a bridge, how about that?"

"I'd prefer the Eiffel Tower," Erik growled, and then sighed angrily. "Goddamn it _fine. _Put that harlot on the phone."

"Oh harrrlot!" Azazel called. "There's someone on the phone for you."

"Tell him to fuck off!" Raven shouted back like a spitting cat.

"Trust me, you're going to want to hear what he has to say."

It took about two seconds to tell Raven the happy news, but another five minutes to get her to believe it, and then another five minutes to talk her down from hysterics.

"Are you seriously serious?" she sobbed even though they had by then established that he was.

"Go pack your bag," he sighed. "And if you breathe a goddamn single word of this to your brother I'll gut you and turn you into _saucisson."_

"I don't know what that is but I will because _I'm going to goddamn Paris!_" she shrieked, clearly jumping for joy on the other end.

"Not a word! Do you hear me? Not to ANYONE-not to the cafe kids, not to Moira, not even to Logan! Not a single fucking person or I'll assassinate you before you even get through customs!"

"I won't, oh Erik I won't! I won't tell anybody! Ha! I'll send them a fucking postcard from Paris! Won't they get a kick out of that!"

"Write to your brother that you're going to stop being such an awful bitch, and let Azazel ensure it's not full of obvious slips, got it?"

"He can read whatever the hell he wants, I'm going to Paris! Oh, Erik, you're the best brother-in-law ever _ever **ever**!" she trilled. Erik couldn't help but smile: she'd never called him her brother in law before. Maybe he'd been right and all it would take would be a Christmas trip to Paris to make the girl cheerful enough not to sob his plan into failure when he asked Charles to move in with him._

"Okay okay, cool it. Put Azazel back on."

"Ohhh lover!" Raven sing-songed off the phone. "Your husband wants to nag at you. I've got to go plan for Parie!"

"You've put her in a right cheerful mood," Azazel said appreciatively.

"Yeah, she's almost as chipper as her brother now. Don't let that good mood distract you from successfully censoring her email. Maybe find a way to block Facebook for a week, too."

"I'll do my best. Is there anything else?"

Erik considered asking about Charlie, asking if the cat was okay, if he was still hanging around, if he looked skinnier or less loved with Erik on vacation. But he decided he couldn't risk it, not with Azazel. He thought about calling Emma to go check on the thing, but didn't think she'd actually drive all the way over there to look after a stray, or go through all the work of sneaking it tuna in the appropriately clandestine manner. Maybe Moira would do it for him. She was soft-hearted like that; it was why she and Charles were such good friends.

"Nah, that's it. We can email about the cafe-even with a phone card this call can't be cheap."

"Alright-hey, how's the vacation going?"

"Oh just swell," Erik groused. "I'll talk to you later."

"Bye, boss."

Needless to say, too much of his conversation was a secret to share any of it with Charles. So he kept quiet, just kissed his boyfriend hello again and listened to him about his day (from Charles in English in one ear and from his mother in German in the other) and sat down on the couch with him to get the play-by-play off Charles' camera, and once he had succeeded in cheering the man all on his own, he encouraged him to check his email.

Charles just grinned at Raven's message; he seemed very sleepy after his long day, and Erik pointed this out. "You should have come home and napped with me. Now you're going to fall asleep at seven again like a grandpa."

The man shut his computer and curled up in his lap: the petulant stance he reserved for sickliness or general self-pity and started to whine but Edie interrupted him by calling them to dinner.

Erik loved his mother's cooking but found he hated meals because it meant Irena inevitably made an appearance. For the most part she was bed-ridden with migraines or paining kidneys or a million other imaginary defects, but somehow she always felt improved enough for meals. Erik tried to ignore her more successfully by focusing on massaging Charles' thigh under the table. It worked beautifully, especially when the man reciprocated.

"_I think Charles is getting sick_," Edie insisted, pouring the man another steaming ladle of matzo soup and brushing his hair back from his brow, true coddling if ever Erik had seen it.

He was surprised when Charles ducked shyly from out of her grasp, pressing his face into Erik's shoulder as if he were embarrassed.

"_He's just tired after all your sightseeing_," Erik replied, brushing his cheekbone over Charles' crown.

"_I don't think so. He seemed tired before we even started sightseeing_."

Erik frowned at this news. Charles had seemed tooth-achingly energetic at the bar.

"Are you feeling alright, Maus?" he questioned, pressing the back of his hand to Charles' cheek. He didn't feel too warm.

Charles shrugged out of his grasp to finish his third helping of matzo.

"In America I'm Mausi but here I'm Maus?"

Erik blushed hard. Mausi was a bit too kitschy to toss around as a grown man in front of people that knew how kitschy it was. "That's not an answer."

"Neither is that."

"Charrrles," he growled and the man laughed.

"I feel fine! Why?"

"Mom said you were a bit listless today."

Charles shrugged, looking at his soup. "You saw the pictures. Did I look listless?"

The man had a point-in all the photos he was as _Heilligkeit _as ever, beaming as if he were having the time of his absolute life.

He turned back to his mother with a shrug. "_He says he feels fine._"

Edie twisted her mouth pensively. "_Maybe I was imagining it._"

"_Well I don't feel fine," _Irena bemoaned glumly. "_Your neighbor has gotten me sick. I knew he would._"

"_He's not my neighbor,_" Erik growled with a roll of his eyes. "_He's my boyfriend."_

Irena looked morosely shocked. "_That's not polite dinner conversation."_

Erik rolled his eyes once more for good measure.


	9. Chapter 9

"Do you wrap Hanukkah presents?" Charles questioned in the bedroom, setting out all eight of Edie's fully-wrapped Hanukkah gifts. Erik had tried to explain that only one gift was really necessary, but Charles never did one nice thing when a holiday was offering up the perfect opportunity to do eight.

"It's a little late for that now, isn't it?" Erik questioned, flicking at one of the gift's quaintly Jewish-themed wrappings.

"I figured I'd do it while I knew I could find the right paper and if it was wrong I could take it off," Charles shrugged.

Erik picked up each of the gifts to make sure Charles hadn't swapped any of the ones they'd picked out together for something more expensive. If Charles felt he absolutely had to buy Edie eight presents Erik was at least going to make sure they weren't eight embarrassingly extravagant gifts, although he should trust Charles by now since he'd managed to contain himself last Hanukkah.

"Which one should we give her tonight?" Charles mused.

"Give her the medium one tonight and we'll surprise her with the big one on the last day," Erik suggested. Normally his family exchanged their largest presents on the last day, but Edie couldn't hold off any longer giving her present to Charles and had begged to exchange the large gifts tonight.

Charles grabbed one and Erik groped it to make sure it was what they had agreed on. Edie had been wanting an American cookbook for a long time, although Erik had no idea why since Edie wouldn't be able to read hardly anything in it. Working off this suggestion, though, Charles had of course decided to take it one step beyond and had actually _made _Edie a cookbook. Erik rather thought 'photo-journal' was a more appropriate description, though. The Brit had forced Erik to help him in the kitchen and photographed their progress through each recipe, including copious photographic evidence of their kitchen fires.

Erik's job, besides working the fire extinguisher and sporting a fireman's uniform for the rest of their recipes (and their bedroom), had been to write out the recipes and photo captions in German exactly as Charles dictated (and he was going to double check it with the German professor on campus so he better not try anything fishy). Erik had a full pack of tissues on hand because this cheesy gift was going to bring the waterworks out in full force, he had no doubt.

* * *

><p>Since Erik was the guest, his mother let him say the prayers and light the menorah. He'd been dreading it all day: the last time he had said the blessings for Hanukkah he was thirty-three and visiting his mother in Brazil. He knew he was rusty, but he had done fine with the <em>Hallel <em>that morning, and it wasn't like Charles was going to know the difference or that his mother would care if he did something wrong. Still, he wished Edie would just at least do the first night to refresh his memory, especially since the first night meant one extra blessing to bestow and damn if he could remember that one.

One would think that going to temple that morning (for the first time in a very, very long time) would have helped refresh his memory enough to get him through one night, but in truth he had been extremely distracted. For one, pinning a yarmulke to Charles' soft brown hair was somehow an unexpectedly erotic act, and, secondly, Charles apparently wanted a play by play of every little thing going on, so that Erik had spent the whole morning alternatively translating every word out of the rabbi's mouth, and getting glared at by the rest of the worshipers.

In truth, though, he needn't have worried at all: his tongue seemed to know what to do even if _he _didn't completely. Besides, his one slip up at the end of the third prayer was already covered up by Edie clapping and crying and telling him what a beautiful job he'd done, and Charles wasn't much less emotional as he kissed his cheek approvingly.

"Is it inappropriate to tell you how sexy I find your Hebrew skills?"

"Do _not _ask me to sing the Haneirot Halalu while I fuck you," Erik growled (mostly because he wasn't sure he would be able to say no, even though it would be the most blasphemous thing he had done in a while). His mother yelped and beat him for saying fuck, and he had to insert Charles between them to save himself from further injury.

"Can we just open the goddamn presents already?" he demanded, rubbing his sore arse.

"I agree. I don't think I could watch someone else spank you for much longer without getting in on that action," Charles winked, somehow managing to squeeze Erik's ass without his mother seeing. Erik wondered how much practice the man had had at discreetly being a slut around mothers, because he certainly seemed too adept at it to be a novice.

They sat down on the couch, the three of them, with Charles in the middle and called Irena out but she begged off, asking her presents to be brought to her in bed, along with some more matzoh soup from last night, some of the latkes they'd made earlier, oh and some orange juice, that would be fantastic.

When they were settled again on the couch Charles somehow finagled Erik into the middle seat, which he didn't exactly mind since it put his two favorite people in the whole world on either side of him. His mother looked about ready to explode with excitement at getting to exchange gifts with her "son-in-law", oh and her son too.

"_Have Charles go first!_" she cried, shaking Erik's arm like a dog with a stuffed animal.

"_You've got a lot to learn, Mama. It'd be easier to get Charles to murder someone than to get him to take before he gave, especially as a guest._"

Edie managed to swipe the both of them with her affectionate eye before stroking Erik's sweater with amusement. "_Alright, kleiner. _You _go first then._"

When Erik went to take his present from the coffee table Charles yanked his arm back as if he were trying to shoplift.

"Erik! Let your mother go first!"

"She told me to go first!" he rather whined. "Besides, if she goes first Hanukkah will be over by time she stops crying."

Charles eyed him distrustfully but sat back, allowing him to search out his present from his mother.

He could tell as soon as he picked it up that it was clothes but he didn't mind that: his mother made amazing clothes, the only ones that fit him right, truthfully.

Sure enough he plucked out a beautiful pair of navy blue slacks and a pale gray-blue dress shirt. And a pair of suspenders.

Edie saw him staring at them and smiled ecstatically. "_I couldn't make those but you seem to love suspenders so much lately that I thought I'd get you a pair! For all you like them you don't own any; I thought for sure you'd know what I was up to when I asked you last month._"

Erik struggled to swallow, unwilling to explain to his mother that the reason he had such a thing for suspenders was because he had discovered how absolutely cock-achingly gorgeous Charles was taking them off.

"Very nice present," the man murmured directly into his ear, reaching over closer than he needed to in order to finger the blue straps provocatively.

"Later," Erik growled and Charles laughed and sat back mercifully. Erik meanwhile turned to his mother and flattered her in his own way, accusing her of spending weeks making something so beautiful, or spending too much money on such fine fabric. She was overjoyed with his praise and she kissed his cheeks happily, hugging him.

"Charles' turn!" she then cheered, reaching across Erik's lap to pat the man on the knee. He smiled bravely and took Erik's new clothes to lay them on the chair beside them out of the way and searched through the presents on the table for his.

"That's from me," Erik balked when Charles caught one up.

"I know, I want to open your present," the Brit replied, kissing his cheek. Erik pushed the gift out of his hands and pressed Edie's to his boyfriend.

"Trust me, if you don't open hers now she's going to have an aneurysm."

He tried to figure out why Charles' mouth twisted like that, but then had to give up as the look disappeared and Charles went about opening Edie's gift. Erik hadn't been trusted enough to know ahead of time, although Edie had asked for Charles' dimensions so he rather assumed it was a shirt or something.

Really, he wasn't far off, he saw, when Charles pushed the wrapping paper aside to stare at his new sweater. It was deeply, darkly blue, but somehow still bright, and it looked extremely soft. The collar buttoned and there was a stripe of red at the hem and cuffs, but the piece de resistence was a broad band going around the shoulders in cream and outlined in red that held a pattern of red hearts.

It was gorgeous and dorky and everything Charles loved and Erik wasn't surprised to see the man's hands shaking slightly as he barely touched the collar, the buttons, the hearts.

"Where on earth did she find this?" he said thickly and Erik sat back, smiling hugely and watching the man overdose on affection. He glanced at his mother and she seemed about thrilled out of her mind at the reception of her gift, hands clasped against one cheek and eyes shining and smile just about painful, he was sure.

"She made it. She's amazing with a pair of knitting needles. Or regular needles actually. Anything textile she's pretty much a pro."

Charles turned to stare at him, eyes bright and wet.

"She-she _made _this?" he choked out. Erik couldn't diminish his grin enough to talk, just nodded.

His grin faded plenty quick though when his boyfriend coughed miserably and jumped up from the couch, shoving his gift onto Erik and sprinting for the bathroom.

Erik and Edie shared dual shocked looks.

"_Erik_!" Edie finally recovered from her surprise to say. "_What did you say to him?_"

"_Mama, nichts! I just said that you knitted his sweater!_"

"_Well you must have said something! Something happened!_"

Erik agreed, and he was tired of tiptoeing around what. He brought his mother to the kitchen and told her to make them hot chocolate while he got the bottom of this and grabbed a knife.

The bathroom door was the same one that was there when he was a child and he knew from experience that a well-placed blade could trip the lock faster than you could say "_Erik, was soll's*!_"

So with a practiced move ingrained into his muscle memory he shoved forward the knife to slide the latch and threw open the door. Then promptly shoved it shut behind him before his mother could catch his boyfriend sobbing in the bathroom on Hanukkah after opening her present.

"Holy fuck, Charles! What's wrong?" he hissed, kneeling in front of the man where he was hunched over on the edge of the bathtub. Handkerchief having a rough go of it trying to rub away as many flooding tears as it could. Charles was too busy trying to keep his sobs absolutely silently to answer.

His eyes were swimming and his cheeks were sopping and splotchy red and he looked as if he were about to choke on his tears but damn it he would _not _make a noise. Erik, meanwhile, felt as if his heart was going to burst out of his chest this sight ruined him so much and he had expected it so little.

"Ah-I'm so-so-sorry," Charles gasped, hyperventilating to the point that he could hardly speak. Erik hadn't seen someone cry so hard as to hyperventilate since Keven fell of his skateboard and skinned his knee down to the bone.

"Shhh, shhh," Erik murmured, putting his arms around the smaller man and holding him to his chest. Charles hitched and trembled in his arms but refused to make a sound, which was more disconcerting than anything. He had cried at those damned abused pets commercials every other day for months and that had been a lot less intense but a lot louder.

"Charles what is it? What's wrong?" he begged to know. The man sucked in deep breaths and pulled away completely, mopping away his tears, but Erik could tell the Brit had rather put off his breakdown than alleviated it.

"I'm sorry," he gasped, forcing his breathing under control with that same iron will he exacted over himself whenever he had to be strong for someone else. "I'm sorry. I just remembered I had to call Raven but she didn't answer and I guess I was just upset. I'm fine now. Please, let's get back to the festivities. Your mo-mother must be worried."

More deep breathing had to get him back under control after that slip but of course he managed it. For how emotional Charles could be, sometimes he seemed even more stony than Erik: like the way he could turn off dour emotions in order to be a better guest. It was cruel, but Erik knew he had to break that, if only just this once. Otherwise this stony covering would grow over the problem and he'd never get to the bottom of this situation.

"You called Raven?" he asked steadily. Charles pressed his handkerchief to his eyes almost painfully and nodded.

"Yes," he murmured thinly. He was trying to keep himself from trembling, was partly succeeding now. It hurt Erik that he was going to have to put a stop to that.

"Where's your cellphone?"

Charles stopped and looked up at him, staring wide with those wet blue eyes rimmed a raw red.

"My phone?" he asked distractedly. Erik nodded. "My phone...it's..." Charles scoped a weak hand to his pockets, but of course didn't find it.

"It's on the nightstand," Erik pointed out.

Charles' staring eyes filled up with tears again which about broke Erik's heart and he took the smaller man up into his arms, caught him as he lost all the self-control he'd so pain-stakingly built up and more. The brunet couldn't keep quiet this time around, brought a hand up to muffle his sobs and when Erik pushed that hand away the palm was angry-red with violent bite-marks.

He didn't know what to do and he didn't know what had brought this on and he was horrified to see that even a year into dating and on the brink of asking the man to move in with him he was still just as clueless as when he'd seen Charles cry for the very first time. He did the only things he could do: he held the man tightly and rocked him and murmured to him and when the man's hitching breaths started to subside he pulled back and helped dry him off.

"What's wrong, Charles?" he murmured.

The brunet eyed him painfully and held his hand and said, "I'm pregnant."

Erik had fallen back on his sore arse hard before he figured out the man was joking.

"How can you joke after those waterworks?" Erik hissed, hitting him vengefully on the arm. The brunet gave a wet laugh and caught Erik's arm, slipped down on the floor to climb pitifully into his lap.

"The truth isn't as fun to admit: I'm an idiot."

Erik reached around and spanked the man hard enough to make him yelp and stare with offense.

"I told you a long time ago what would happen if you talked about yourself like that to me!" he said defensively. "Now, without being a dick, tell me what happened."

"It's too melodramatic to talk about now. I'll tell you later," Charles sighed, and tried to stand up but Erik wouldn't let him.

"I forced my mother to make winter beverages in order to hold you while you sobbed uncontrollably on the first night of Hanukkah: you can damn well tell me now," Erik insisted and Charles knew that insistent voice enough to recognize the fact that he wasn't getting out of this bathroom without appeasing it.

"Do you remember when we first started dating? I mean really dating, like cuddling up on the couch every night instead of going on actual dates because we're a lazy couple? Do you remember what you told me?"

"Nope, no idea."

"You said it was going to take some time for you to get used to being a real boyfriend, to have someone want to be around you more often than not and to want that in return, to miss someone, to...well even to love someone."

Erik blushed. "Yeah I guess I remember saying something like that. But what does that have to do with secret bathroom sobbing?"

"Do you remember, around the same time, when you found out you were listed as my emergency contact and cried so hard you got a bloody nose?"

Erik glared at him for bringing that up. They had sworn they would _never _bring that up.

"I vaguely remember something along those lines," he growled.

"It was just shocking for you to not have anyone love you like that for a long time and then to suddenly have it, right? You weren't sad and you weren't especially happy, you were just surprised and not particularly used to it all the way yet."

Erik didn't feel like admitting he _still _wasn't used to it, having someone love him as intensely as Charles did and feeling the same way in return. Now was not really the time nor the place.

"So you're surprised that I love you enough to bring you to Hanukkah, that's what this is?"

"No," Charles sighed, sucking on his bottom lip woefully. "I'm fully used to you loving me, it's never been a problem for me to know that men love me. I'm surprised that your _mother _loves me."

Erik pulled back, staring wide-eyed, but Charles was avoiding his gaze, cheeks pink with embarrassment.

He opened his mouth to speak but someone was knocking on the door.

"_Is Charles alright? Does he need a doctor?_"

"_Nein, Mama_," Erik called back through the door. "_We're fine; we'll be out soon._"

"_I'll go pour your hot chocolate,_" Edie said, trying for joviality over her apparent anxiety.

Charles climbed out of his lap and helped him to stand and once they were both upright he held Charles' face in his hands and kissed him gently, brushed his hair back, hugged him tight.

"Tonight, after my mother goes to bed, I'll come climb into bed with you and we can finish this then," he murmured, making his words sounds more like a promise than a threat.

"I'll try not to sob hysterically," Charles said self-deprecatingly.

"Hey," Erik said, gripping into his hair softly and gazing into his eyes. "Do you remember what I told you last time?"

Charles nearly shivered in his arms. "I don't think I'll ever forget what you told me," he murmured.

"I'm strong enough to lean on, if you need to. I'm in this for the long haul."

"I love you, Erik," the brunet sighed, hugging him tightly. Erik grinned and caressed his hair.

"I love you too, Heulsuse**."

Charles pulled back glaring at him suspiciously. "Is that like some kind of crying reference?"

Erik just shrugged. "I don't know what you're talking about. Now wring out your handkerchief and let's go watch my mother cry as hard as you when she opens _her _gift."

* * *

><p>My terrible German translations!<p>

*Was soll's: What the hell/heck.

** Heulsuse: Crybaby


	10. Chapter 10

A/N: Aw crap y'all! We're quickly approaching the end of what I have written to this point! It's tough: I'm working on a few other stories at the same time and so yeah…I'm sorry if updates start getting slow! Thanks to Auri for fixing my German (the parts I've gotten around to fixing up to this point—yikes!)! And thanks to all of you, of course, for reading and tolerating these slower updates I hope the uberfluff is mostly worth it!

Erik put off his mother's concern by lying to her in order to not humiliate his boyfriend: he said that Raven had called Charles and they'd gotten into a fight. His mother spent the rest of the night up until her present-opening railing against a girl heartless enough to bring dear sweet Charles to tears-and during Hanukkah, too! After her present she was too busy crying to think much about Raven.

She made him and Charles sit right up on either side of her and walk her through every single photo of her new cookbook, ignoring the captions in order to hear the recap in person.

Charles had set the book into five sections: breakfast, carnivorous, vegetarian, sweets, breads, and drinks, and had made Erik help him cook one recipe from each section. The first page was a picture of them before any disasters had occurred: pristine in the matching aprons Moira had gotten them for Christmas (red and white checked with hearts and frilly lace-this was the only time Erik had ever worn his and was overjoyed when by time they got to desserts he had managed to set it on fire) and grinning at the camera because they had yet to figure out what kind of trouble Charles had set them up for.

They had been under the woeful misapprehension until then that having Charles in the kitchen with him would prevent Erik from being too destructive. They now knew better. By the time they hit the vegetarian section the fire department was already begging Charles to save them the time and expense and simply ban Erik from the kitchen. The Brit got drunk with the fire chief and agreed to keep Erik away from the oven in exchange for a worn-out uniform and dented helmet. It had taken them two days to drag themselves out of the bedroom long enough to finish the cookbook.

But Edie didn't need to know that.

She saw the pictures of them posing with a good-spirited fire-fighter next to the scorch mark on Charles' oven wall, and of Erik wielding the fire-extinguisher spitefully while Raven panicked with 911 on speed-dial in the background. There were pictures of Erik regaled to vegetable slicer after that, and the many band-aids that in turn required.

On the last page was Erik with his fire-helmet and charred apron, along with an exhausted-looking Charles, and a note Charles had painstakingly written out in German.

_I hope you enjoyed our cooking lessons. The most important lesson I learned was to keep Erik out of the kitchen. I don't know how his home ec teacher survived, or the school for that matter. I'm very excited to visit you in December, and I know I'll love it and love you. I hope this book finds you very well, and that it makes you smile rather than fear for our lives. Thank you very much for giving birth to the love of my life._

_Yours,_

_Charles_

Edie smiled past all her crying and wrapped Charles up in a hug that he suffered through stiffly, glancing at Erik nervously. He pet the Brit's shoulders consolingly, willing him to calm the fuck down. It was only a hug. He could pretend to like a hug from his mother.

This put him on the track of trying to figure out what he was going to say to the man that was somehow going to make him feel well enough to stop acting like a spazz around Edie. He, of course, didn't come up with anything, and secretly hoped his mother never went to sleep so he wouldn't have to have this conversation.

But of course his mother had to sleep. And of course he had to do his boyfriendly duty and help his man out of this tearful, emotional mess. He reminded himself that, awkward as tearful conversations were, he'd rather deal with them when they showed up than have the sort of relationship where Charles felt he couldn't share, couldn't cry, and couldn't depend on him in hard times.

So when Edie was safely ensconced in her room Erik swallowed down his aversion and tiptoed silently into Charles' bed.

The man was waiting for him, pressed up on his side against the wall, pulling back the heavy comforters for him. Charles was like a perfect little mini-heater, and that, coupled with the multiple duvets and quilts, made the bed so incredibly cozy that Erik lost his train of thought for a second. He just wrapped his arms around the smaller man and tangled their legs together and breathed in the warm, clean scent of him.

"Sorry I ruined Hanukkah," the man murmured.

"You didn't ruin it, although I feel bad for buying you all those handkerchiefs now."

"Yes, that was rather inappropriate."

"You didn't warn me there would be crying all up and down this trip-I had no idea."

"I didn't know either. I was so looking forward to this whole vacation and now all I want to do is run off to Paris before your mother cottons on to my eccentric behavior."

"Why does she make you so nervous? She already loves you to bits."

Charles shifted awkwardly in his grasp and sighed. "I'm just...it's just...it feels so strange, having her like me. I don't know how to react."

"What, you thought she was going to hate you? You're my boyfriend!"

Charles shrugged and nuzzled in closer. "I don't know," he mumbled. "I thought she'd treat me like...I don't know...Emma."

"Like Emma treats you? You mean barely disguised distaste?"

"Okay, okay, I thought she'd treat me like a waitress treats me: nice enough but not so authentic. I thought she'd like me _through_ you, like with a buffer. Instead I'm getting it all head-on and it's making me spazz out."

Erik chuckled and squeezed the man very tightly. "Oh my poor little Heulsuse! How tough it is to be loved so intensely by so many people!"

The smaller man whined against him, smacking him lightly. "Erik, I'm serious! What am I going to do? If I keep freaking out around her she's going to think I hate her!"

He nodded seriously. This was very true: if Charles kept freezing up in her arms or ducking away from her coddling or hiding behind Erik as a love-buffer this was indeed what Edie was going to think: her son-in-law hated her.

"Here's what we're going to do:" Erik took a deep breath to say. "You're going to fake it."

Charles was silent, pulling back to stare at him in the dark. "Pardon?"

Grinning, Erik continued. "You're just going to put on that happy face you've got set aside for benefit dinners and society brunches and the country-club golf tournament. You faked your way through every sunny conversation with all of those hoity-toity bastards and you're going to fake your way through pretending to not be terrified out of your mind by my four-foot-eleven mom's hugs."

"Har bloody har," Charles growled.

"Really, I don't know how you didn't think of this before. You're notoriously able to fake affection. I'm still not even sure you really love me. Maybe you're just currying free chai-latte-favors out of me."

"Erik, dear, I have a confession to make."

Erik grinned, waiting for what he had so easily set himself up for.

Instead he got: "I've never liked your chai lattes. Not ever."

Erik blinked himself blearily awake and reached for the main thing that made being awake tolerable: his boyfriend. Instead he got an armful of empty bed.

How in the hell had the man managed that? He'd had him squeezed up against the wall for the whole night-how had he managed to slip away without waking him, especially in this squeaky bed?

Sighing vengefully, he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling until he could keep his eyes open for more than two seconds at a time.

He tried to wrap his head once more around the fact that Charles actually had no interest in the drink that had forged their love affair.

He failed.

"It's too spicy," Charles had confessed to him last night.

"I added sweetener to it!"

"It's still too spicy. It speaks to how much I wanted into your pants that I managed to down so many of them."

Erik grit his teeth and vowed to change chai spice brands. He'd go in for that sissy Oregon chai crap that couldn't put hair on a man's chest with a Locks of Love donation and a hot glue gun. Anything was worth it to regain the drink that had brought him his love, even though said love was now claiming it was his own libido that had actually brought them together.

When he was done swearing his new fealty to crappy sweet chai he rolled out of bed and got dressed for yet another day of sightseeing: a pair of long underwear under his jeans and two sweaters over his long-sleeved shirt.

When he did finally make an appearance it was to giggling.

Frozen in his tracks at the soul-crushing off-ness of this, it took him a second to figure out it was coming from the kitchen, and another full minute to follow up on it, tiptoeing stealthily.

There was more laughter, and he could tell it was his mother, but thought it might be some alien only pretending to be his mother so he kept his stealth skills up until he'd turned the corner enough to peer inside.

He didn't know why he bothered: both Edie and Charles had practically supernatural skills when it came to telling when he was around.

They both looked up at him from cooking breakfast together, beaming.

Charles was wearing his new sweater and a pair of black jeans that Erik had bought him with the hope that he would wear them but certainly not the belief. They looked exactly as he had imagined they would when he snatched them off the shelf at the Gap. Namely: just about painted on.

He swallowed back his rush of saliva and tried to figure out what the hell was happening.

"We thought we'd try out the new cookbook for breakfast," Charles explained happily, eyes shining.

"_We've been having a wonderful morning!" _Edie exclaimed, patting Charles happily. Erik realized her arm was around his waist. "_And to imagine I was beginning to think he didn't like me!" _

"_Everybody likes you, Mama," _he assured with a grin, walking over to kiss her cheek.

"Good start," he added to Charles, kissing him a little more intensely.

"She's buying it, then?" the man asked through his smile.

"I had the conversation with you just last night and _I'm _buying it."

Actually, it was rather disconcerting to watch Charles be this good at lying to someone, even though he wasn't actually lying. He did like Edie and he wasn't pretending to like her: he was just pretending to not be severely freaked out by her liking him. But looking at him sitting there making French toast with his mother, one would have absolutely no idea that the man was probably spazzing like a freakazoid on the inside. He looked perfectly at ease, and perfectly genial, except for the moments where he'd suddenly turn to Erik, eyes wide with fear, before going back to his charade.

Irena showed up as they were setting the table, and made indecent comments about Charles' indecently tight pants. Erik didn't bother to translate, instead grinning as Edie poured Charles' milk (Erik had to pour his own) and hugged him jovially around the shoulders, petting his hair back and keening "_Oh my handsome little son-in-law!" _

"What is she saying?" Charles questioned, leaning into her embrace as if his mind weren't probably contemplating running from the room in a panic.

Erik wasn't sure what this news would do to his self-control, but he translated anyway, slightly hesitant: "She keeps calling you her son-in-law. I think she's trying to guilt me into proposing to you."

Charles eyed him through his lashes in that unbelievably sultry way he had and said, "Go on, then. Get on your knees."

Erik blushed. "Only _one _knee is necessary," he reminded.

Charles just smiled: "If you want me to say 'yes' you'd better be on the safe side and start with two."

"Go get your jacket on and I'll blow you at all the major monuments of my hometown, _Helligkeit."_

"Actually," Charles admitted, finishing off his toast. "I was thinking we could spend today indoors."

Erik practically fell out of his chair he was so shocked.

"You're fucking kidding me!" he balked, blocking his mother's blow for saying 'fucking'. "Yesterday I couldn't _drag _you home-now you're turning me down on a blow job at the student prison?"

Edie might not know what it meant to 'blow' someone in English, but apparently 'blow job' was similar enough in German for her to figure that out and Erik was stuck brushing the taste of soap out of his mouth for the rest of the morning, glaring at the brunet because it was his fault. Absolutely his fault.

Realizing that Charles was serious about his plans for the day, Erik went back to the bedroom to get out of his jeans and one of his sweaters, fully planning on lounging about the house for the rest of the day in his long johns and hoping that the sight would move Charles to regret turning down an orgasm from him. He could tell immediately by the frustrated glint in the man's eye that that mission was perfectly accomplished.

They hung out watching old home videos that Erik tried to ignore; he translated full conversations between Edie and Charles that were tooth-achingly adorable; and when Edie went to buy groceries so they could bake cookies together, Erik and Charles had a wrestling match to decide who would suck off whom before she got back.

Charles won (or, rather, Charles cheated) and got to do the honors and Erik was still brain-dead and boneless by time his mother got back, cheerful and excited and none the wiser.

He wasn't allowed in the kitchen while they were baking because Edie still believed he was bad luck regarding anything that relied on a modicum of fortuity to produce. He had to sit in the hallway glaring in at them (in so much as he was capable of glaring after getting all moxie sucked out through his cock), translating as needed, although it was mostly worth it since Charles snuck him raw cookie dough, something his mother firmly believed would give him food poisoning. His one regret in life was not being born to a woman who had no fear of raw eggs, and thus let him eat the best parts of cooking. Once cookies went into the oven he had no more interest in them, and this indifference extended to cake and brownies. For his birthday Charles had give him raw cake batter with a floating candle. It was the best birthday of his life. (It helped that Charles didn't discriminate against frosting in the bedroom).

His affectionate glance must have not gone unnoticed because his mother came close enough to hiss at him: "_Frag ihn!_"

Charles looked up from his cookie-cutting innocently.

"Ask me what?"

Erik glared at his mother hard. He had warned her that the man wasn't beyond spontaneously picking up German if it would help him get to the bottom of secrets.

Edie didn't look ashamed though, she looked adoring. She wrapped her arms around Charles' shoulders as he sat, leaning her head against his affectionately.

"_Oh my smart little Spatzi!_" she crooned, rocking him. Then she turned to Erik, grinning over Charles' skull. "_When he lives with you you can really teach him German! Then we can speak German together all the time!"_

"Eriiik," Charles sing-songed. "Ask me what?"

"Fine: Charles, will you have my babies?"

The other man sniggered, glaring at him playfully. "That's not what she told you to ask me."

"Still, I don't think I'm that far off."


	11. Chapter 11

A/N: Helloooo anyone's who's still reading! I'm caught up with a couple other fics I'm doing so Mutti is officially on the backburner for sure. I'm not super sure if it'll ever get finished, actually. This is the last chapter I have written and my other fics are taking up literally all my time. There's just nothing left to write Mutti with! I suppose once I finish those fics I could come back and finish Mutti but I guess we'll see. Sorry to all five of you who are put out by this lol. I hope you're not upset!

He let Charles have the window seat on the train, to take in a full quarter of an hour's worth of landscape.

The week had gone by faster than he had ever anticipated and it was already Monday, too early in the morning to be exactly comfortable in regards to waking up and also temperature. The sun hadn't had time to thaw anything yet and it was a relief to get into the heated train even though it meant leaving his mother on the platform. He hadn't cried, but it had been extremely close, and he suspected he was only saved from wet eyes by his tear ducts being frozen shut.

His mother had had it harder: she'd fallen so in love with Charles it was like sending two sons away on the train to Paris rather than just one. Still, she hadn't been distracted to the point where she couldn't load them down with tupperware, threaten Erik into eating more, and force a passing maintenance man to take their picture together. She had only barely pulled her tears back when Charles said, in his precious German : "_Ich liebe dich, Mama. Ich werde dich vermissen_." and she started sobbing all over again, wrapping her arms around his waist like she'd changed her mind and decided not to part with him. It made Erik nervous that maybe he'd hit the nail on the head.

"_Mama, give him back. He can't stay here,_" he warned, dragging his boyfriend back into his arms where he belonged.

"_Maybe if he doesn't want to live with you he could come live with me,_" she sobbed hopefully.

"_Don't say that!_" Erik balked, jolting, and Charles gripped him consolingly even though he didn't know what he was consoling against.

"What?" he gasped. "What did she say?"

"She's contemplating stealing you from me. Quick, get on the train before she makes another go of it." And Erik started pushing him up into the train car.

He allowed them all one more kiss goodbye, caught Edie trying to shove money in his pockets ("in case you get hungry on the train"), and made their escape final before she could try anything else.

She called him immediately on his handy.

"_Frag ihn_!" she hissed, and hung up after yet another rushed 'I love you'.

But that was ridiculous because it was only fifteen minutes till they switched trains in Mannheim-the trip was too short to even justify taking off their jackets, much less putting life-altering queries to the younger man.

"It'll be strange to be able to speak the language again," Charles hummed, taking his mittens off. His mother had knit them for the man and they were obnoxiously adorable, with a bright red cord to string them over Charles' shoulders like a child.

"You seemed to get by okay. By the end I'm pretty sure you and my mother were having purely telepathic conversations."

"Oh we were-didnt' I tell you? I'm a telepath now." Charles turned to him seriously, putting two fingers to his temple and staring into Erik's eyes so deeply he could see every fluctuation of blue. It was more attractive than unnerving, having Charles so close to him, even though he did have a secret big enough at the moment for him to dread Charles suddenly becoming a mind-reader. "Why, Mr. Lensherr!" Charles balked, sitting back in his seat and smacking Erik's shoulder teasingly. "What on earth gave you the idea that I'm that sort of boy? Fuck you in the storage room, really! Maybe once we switch trains."

But when they dragged all their luggage to their new train Erik didn't give himself the opportunity to get manhandled into the storage room and debauched. For once he had more important things on his mind.

"Charles," he started, distracting the Brit from the window as they passed Mannheim city limits.

"You ready?" the man beamed back, slipping out of his jacket, his sage-green henley tight over a simple white tee and making Erik's mouth water. He swallowed hard and stilled Charles with a chaste grip to his knee.

"I have something to ask you," he persevered. Charles' eyes glinted at him. Oh god, the man thought this was all part of the game, didn't he?

"Anything you want, darling, don't be shy," he hummed, attempting to slip forward and seduce Erik by proximity. He shifted his elbow to catch under the man's stark collarbone and fend him off.

"Charles, will you move in with me?" he asked in one quick rush, like pulling off a bandaid. But the scrape never simply stared back at him the way Charles was doing.

The man stopped trying to attack him and so he could bring his fending arm down, the better to fidget with. He stared steadfastly at the back of the seat in front of him and continued into the terrifying silence.

"You don't have to answer right now. I just wanted you to think about it. I'll leave you alone now," he said, clearing his throat and got up to hide in the dining car with plenty of beer. He wasn't sure what it meant that Charles didn't try to stop him.

He was on his third pint and about shaking with nerves an hour later, still alone in the dining car. His fingers were already tapping on his handy, wondering if he should call his mother and bitch her out for making him believe that asking Charles this question would ever ever ever be at all a good thing. This was stupid. He should have let well enough alone. His boyfriend loved him, had been ready and raring to go on a tryst in the storage room-and he had had to go ruin it asking if the jerk wanted to live with him.

Why should he want to complicate a beautiful situation? Sure maybe it would be great, be _amazing_, to see Charles' toothbrush sitting in the holder next to his-his real one, not the backup he left there just in case. Maybe it would blow his fucking mind to hand over all of his wall space for Charles' photographic love-murals. Maybe he'd sell off bits of his hardly-used soul to wake up to those bleary blue eyes and rumpled brown hair every single day and fall asleep with it every night. But what he had was pretty god damn good too. Was a hell of a sight better than nothing, which was what he would have if Charles didn't want to live with him. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow or next month, but a 'no' was still an eventual death to everything he had with Charles right this moment.

It would mean saying goodbye to the kisses that always seemed to get out of hand no matter what, to the way the man reached out to fit their hands together like an afterthought that was anything but, to the idyllic love notes the man hid in his coat pockets waiting for them to be found. To the arch and writhe of that body beneath his. The kissed-red swell of his lips. The gleam of a bright-blue eye that was more pupil than iris and gorgeous for it.

Erik had about frightened himself into a panic attack with all the imagining of things he wouldn't be able to do with Charles once they inevitably broke up and his hands were shaking when Charles burst angrily into the dining car.

Everyone stared at him, his hair mussed up on one side, his eyes blazing and his cheeks pink with exertion so that Erik had the mad idea that the Brit had somehow gone about the tryst in the storage area without him. But then the man caught sight of him at the bar and settled back into his regular self. He coughed nervously into his fist, crumpling a sheath of paper in his free hand, scuffling his feet on the carpet before shuffling his way anxiously over to the bar.

Erik turned back to his drink, too nervous to even look at him. He stared at the shelves of drinks instead as Charles ordered a faint double whiskey on the rocks.

Charles didn't drink whiskey. Well, he drank everything, really-but he didn't _seek out _whiskey. When the bartender got him his drink Charles didn't attempt to chat the man up at all, not even in the slightest, even though there was decent chance the man could speak English, or maybe French. He tipped back half his drink in one go, hissing, and then was silent again.

Erik didn't say anything. He didn't have the slightest clue what to say. He wracked his brain trying to come up with something, anything, but then Charles was speaking and his brain could only focus in on those words, the bearers of his fate.

Maybe Charles would simply beg for more time, put it off. Erik could do that-he'd much rather do that than get a flat 'no'.

It wasn't looking like he'd have that kind of luck, though, when Charles said, wavery and insecure, "I haven't been completely honest with you, Erik."

His heart went silent in his chest, wanting to hear every word as much as the rest of his body. What did that mean? Erik's mind, freed up from background noise like breathing, sped: Charles was having an affair, Charles was secretly married, he was an alien, he had a baby stashed away somewhere.

"I can't...I can't live with you...until you know..." Charles took a ragged breath to admit and the first part of his sentence was enough to send Erik's body into paroxysms of trauma, as if every part of him had suddenly started flailing and screaming. And yet he didn't make a sound, his hand was shaking but capable as it brought his beer up to chug.

"I'm not actually a tidy person," the Brit gasped out in one breath, downed the rest of his whiskey at once and ordered another.

Erik just stared at him, and Charles fidgeted under his gaze, blushing hot but not meeting his eye.

"What?" he murmured.

"I know that my place is always nice when you come over, but it's a sham. I'm horribly messy. I mean, just really awful. I hate doing dishes and there's always clothes all over the floor, or books or dishes forgotten everywhere...I just wanted you to know before you really asked me to live with you."

Erik threw his head back and laughed.

"Are you kidding?" he cackled mirthfully.

"What?" Charles balked, still nervous. He supposed laughing wasn't a good response to such a heartfelt confession, it was just...

"I've been to your office, Charles-I know you're second only to Logan in your lazy housekeeping."

"I'm a sight better than Raven," Charles argued back, offended.

"You're exactly as bad as Raven, you just make an actual effort to _hide _your mess."

"That's not all," Charles persevered bitterly, checking his paper to be sure that wasn't all. "I...I watch...damn it, I watch reality TV okay?"

Erik watched him carefully as he nursed his second whiskey, not sure if the color to his cheeks was embarrassment or tipsiness or both.

"What like...cooking shows?"

Charles glared at him quickly from the corner of his eye as if he was being purposefully naive.

"Like American's Next Top Model. I mean like the really trashy reality TV. You have no idea how hard it's been to date you and miss The Bachelorette every week. I have to watch it at work and erase my search history."

"But you're not an idiot!" Erik gasped.

Charles' lips twitched, not into a smile, but into a miserable frown. He sank into his whiskey. "I understand if you don't want to live with me anymore," he muttered in a small voice.

Erik grinned, still staring.

"What else is on your list?"

Charles finished his drink, got yet another, before he checked. At this rate he was going to be well and truly drunk in just a couple more confessions. He could handle his liquor very well but not at this speed.

"I'm an awful sick person. I mean you're going to really hate me when I get sick, and I get sick at least once a year."

"We've been dating for over a year and I've never seen you get sick once," Erik countered.

Charles blushed and scratched the back of his neck nervously.

"Do you remember in July when my friends and I went to the lake house but you couldn't get away because of work?"

"And you decided to stay an extra week?"

"I was sick out of my mind. Logan was so fed up with me by the end of it he threatened to drown me. Or call you."

"He should have. I would've taken care of you," Erik assured passionately, petting Charles' hair. The brunet sighed sadly, shaking his head.

"You don't understand. There is no taking care of me in that state, there's not even any _appeasing _me. It's like I stay mostly good-natured over the course of the year and then use up all of my assholishness in one week. I'm a tyrant; I'm Idi Amin. All you can do it try to not be driven to murder me. I'll make a full week of your life as miserable as it's capable of being."

Erik just smiled back, still petting. "Well, you make the rest of my life pretty blissful, so a week of misery is very doable."

When Charles looked at him it was with a faint smile, and he didn't look so nervous when he glanced at his paper again.

"I listen to pop music."

Erik slapped his hand on the counter.

"I _knew _it! I _knew _Raven didn't preset the dance station to your car's radio! You cheeky liar!"

"I'm sorry," Charles wailed. "But you always gag when they play it at the grocery store or wherever and I just couldn't cop to it!"

"So you played it off like that trash was your sister's fault?"

Charles gasped, scandalized, and huffed back, "Lady Gaga is _not _trash! And if you live with me you're going to be hearing a lot more of her!"

Erik grimaced unhappily. Could he tolerate pop music and reality TV for the love of his life?

"Okay, okay, move on-what's next?"

A check of the paper and Charles was ready with the next article on his agenda.

"I'm going to jerk off."

It was impossible for his brain to deal with a sentence like that. It just made a shrill humming noise as all units went temporarily offline and he stared at his boyfriend abjectly. Did the man mean like..._right now_?

"Whu?" he said.

Grinning, Charles smacked his arm. "I mean if we live together. I mean, it's not anything against you, it's just a fact and I want you to have all the facts beforehand. My libido just runs higher than yours, and it's unrealistic to think that we're both going to be in the mood at the same time all the time. At some point we're going to be on different schedules or something and it's going to happen and I just don't want your feelings to be hurt when it happens."

Erik nodded gamely. Before Charles, he had rarely jerked off just because he didn't seem to need it as often. With Charles his libido had skyrocketed simply to try and keep up, but it was still rare that he felt the need to take care of anything himself. The only times it happened really was when Charles was out of town or when the man specifically directed him to do it. He doubted Charles needed to worry about getting his feelings hurt by Erik seeing to himself, but he was glad to be warned against the possible situation in general.

"Got it. Anything else I need to know?"

"You know how social you think I am?"

"...Yeah..."

"I'm actually like twenty-five percent more social than that."

"You're already running at one hundred percent, how can you get twenty-five percent more than that?"

"Do you remember that science club I go to every Thursday?"

"Yes..."

"That's actually kind of my date night with my friends. We go to concerts or movies or bars or any stuff like that."

"But you hang out with your friends all weekend as it is!"

"Only one night of the weekend! You can't expect me to only see my friends once a week!"

Erik had fully thought that he could and was worried to find out that he couldn't. When he had imagined Charles living with him he had mostly imagined their books mixed together on his shelves, Charles' expensive sheets on his bed, Charles cooking in his kitchen and Erik doing their dishes. He had not thought of Charles' shit TV programs on his TV or his awful pop music on his stereo, or his near-constant socializing. His worry apparently bled through to his face because Charles commented.

"Maybe you should rethink this," the Brit murmured softly.

Erik did rethink it. His rethinking mainly focused on the fact that he was less than perfect as well and that if he was lucky enough for Charles to agree to look past his imperfections and live with him then he could certainly return the favor.

"I'm disgustingly lazy. I mean you will be physically disgusted by how lazy I can be."

"I knew you were lazy! I mean, for the number of times you insisted that sitting with me on the couch all night was the most romantic possibility available, I rather assumed..."

"Well I'm sorry, I didn't have the opportunity to come up with a list of _surprising _things to warn you against," he complained. "Although in my defense I'm actually lazier than you think I am. I've probably left my house more since dating you than I have since I bought it."

"We should discuss technicalities as well," Charles suggested anxiously, sipping his whiskey again. He really was going to get well and truly drunk.

"What like...what you'll bring?" he asked, heart fluttering, because discussing technicalities was discussing the future. This conversation he fucking loved: he would finally be able to actually visualize what his house would look like. He'd find out if Charles meant to bring that gorgeous couch of his or if Erik would have to continue using his shitty one, he'd discover whether his bedroom would now consist of Charles' dark teak bedframe or his own metal one.

But instead Charles decided to absolutely demolish his bubble.

"I want to pay the mortgage. Or at least the property tax."

Erik grimaced with disgust. "No."

"Then I can't live with you. I'm sorry but I don't want this to be like a free ride, I want shared responsibility. I'm an adult, not your rent boy and not your child. I get to help care for us or I'm out."

Erik glared but Charles was too tipsy for it to have any effect.

"What about me? I don't want to be your gutter-boyfriend getting his house paid for by his sugar daddy."

"That's not what this is!" Charles balked.

"Then how come you want to pay my whole mortgage instead of going halves with me, hmm? Because you're rich and I'm just measly middle class."

"No!" Charles argued, but he didn't have any argument beyond that.

"I can pay my mortgage just fine without a rich boyfriend. I've been managing fine for the last fifteen years or so, you know."

"I know!"

"Then you'll stop with this pay-poor-guy's-mortgage-for-him crap?"

Charles collapsed, deflated, and pouted into his drink, nodded.

"But I want to pay for something," he begged. "I want us to be equal in this thing."

Erik shrugged. "You can buy groceries, how's that?"

"And the property tax?"

Erik grumbled.

"Part of the property tax?"

Rolling his eyes, Erik finally agreed.

Technicalities got them through another half an hour and got Charles deep into a state of sloppy drunkenness (mostly due to the tearful realization that, no, Raven could not live with them).

"S'ya really wanna?" he slurred, collapsing sideways into Erik's lap and apparently doing his best to topple both their barstools despite the fact that they were bolted to the floor. "Y'really wanna live with me?"

"I really want you to live with me, Helligkeit," Erik assured with a grin.

Charles beamed back up at him, cheeks luminous pink in their alcoholic blush.

"Oh god, wow, Erik, you've just gotta fuck me now."

Erik didn't really think he could get away with fucking his boyfriend on a train-it took too long, you had to get too naked, and it caused too much mess. But they were nearly in Paris by now, and Paris was the city of love...hopefully that included love-_making_ as well.


	12. Epilogue

**A/N: This thing just didn't feel complete without at least a little vision into their domestic bliss, so here. If you prefer domestic unbliss I have a snippet of that too, but maybe I'll keep that for the director's cut. We don't want to mar this fluff with bickering, do we?**

* * *

><p>"Stoooooooooop!" Alex groaned, both hands over his ears as he collapsed across the bar by the cash register. "I can't take it anymore!"<p>

"You complain when I'm grouchy. You complain when I'm happy," Erik stopped whistling to sigh. "Why don't you make up your mind?"

The blonde turned on him immediately. "Are you bipolar? Why can't you be a normal guy with normal moods? Why does it have to be Wes Craven monster or Disney princess, with absolutely no middle ground?"

"If you call me a Disney princess one more time I'm going to show Wes Craven a thing or two about monsters," he growled, finishing wiping down the espresso machine and tossing the wet towel at Alex's head. "Now go close up shop-I'll count out."

"We've still got ten minutes left," Alex pointed out after shucking the towel from his face.

Erik shrugged. "No one's going to come in in ten minutes. Close it down."

"Sure but when it's Lorna waiting up for me you suddenly discover stock that needs sorting at ten at night," Alex grumbled.

"Lorna's not as pretty as Charles," Erik tried to explain, taking the boy bodily from his spot and pushing him from to the front of house. "Now get to work."

"Okay, everybody," Alex cried out to the few customers hiding out from the spring drizzle outside. "The Shark's got to go try a new page of the Kama Sutra out on his live-in boyfriend. Everybody out."

Most of the people took it in stride, they were only getting kicked out a few minutes early, after all, and the one person that did decide to kick up quieted back down when Erik laid Charles' old cricket bat on the countertop.

He didn't bother to correct Alex. Although he and Charles had finished off the Kama Sutra ages ago, they hadn't done it in their house, their house together, their house with their things and their lives intermingled under their roof, so it could stand to be re-done, properly this time. It was a heady rush of emotions, still new, recent, and this was the first time Erik had had to work late enough to not be able to enjoy it fully. Janos had called in sick although Erik suspected the man was simply on another Friday-night boyfriend-finding mission, and would assault him with that belief when he saw him on Monday. Azazel meanwhile was spending a weekend with Raven at the lakehouse to bask in what was to be the first sunny weekend of the spring, once this rain blew itself out.

Charles had been living with him for not quite two months now, and he'd managed to be home by six every night of it so he supposed he shouldn't complain, but damn it he was going to do it anyway. It didn't help that Charles had rolled him over in bed that morning when he tried to get up, humming, "I'll wait up for you, shall I? We can start the weekend early going through the rest of the List."

It had long ago been decided that they'd start living together off right by having a good-luck screw in every room of the house, and Charles had interesting views on what counted as "rooms"-they'd already crossed off both halves of the staircase, as well as the garage. All they really had left was the closets and the garden shed, and Charles had thought up a truly inspired piece where Erik was the burly gardener and Charles was the curious estate-owner's son. They were invested in this idea. Charles had already swept the place clear of mood-killing spider webs and had tested the bondage properties of garden hose (not good, but-oh-look at that, the gardener just so happened to have some nylon rope handy-how lucky).

Really it was amazing he had lasted till almost ten.

"Are you seriously this slow? I'm already done with cash _and _credit cards!" Erik balked as Alex huffed around sloppily with the mop.

"Just go drop the bags, I'm practically finished!" the boy exclaimed, which was true but only because he was doing such a godawful job of it. Erik pretended he didn't notice because if he actually noticed he'd have to say something about it, and then Alex would start over, and damn it but his cock did not have that kind of time.

He dropped the startup bag for tomorrow and brought the deposit bag with him for the bank tomorrow, assuming he could stop fucking in closets long enough to get there, and that was debatable. They had thought it would take no time at all to get through the house, but Charles was so smitten with their new bedroom, upstairs in the masters, which still weirded the hell out of Erik at times-he hadn't slept there since he'd been with Magda-that they'd wasted round after round there, if Erik were capable of considering anything that happened between him and Charles as a waste of anything. Which was in doubt.

"Out, out, out," he demanded, ushering Alex to the backdoor.

"I didn't sweep the back room!" the boy balked.

"It'll still be there tomorrow, and so will you if you don't get the hell out of here and stop giving me trouble."

Alex rolled his eyes dramatically but dutifully walked off. "Tell Charles hi for me. Except...you know...not while..._bye._"

Erik tried to call Charles on the way home-it was strange but even though they saw each other literally every single day, woke up together, ate breakfast together, dinner, cuddled together on the couch watching terrible reality TV shows, Erik still couldn't seem to get through a day without calling Charles, sometimes with purpose and sometimes just to fill him up with the man's voice, his laugh, his flirting, even after more than a year the flirting-but the man didn't pick up.

Probably the Brit was on the line with his sister. Now that they didn't live together for once in their lives they were on the phone to one another constantly, driving him mad at every opportunity. He hoped no one had decided to drop by, god forbid-Charles was supposed to text him if anyone did, just as warning, but Charles could be forgetful with other people around to distract him, and Erik was living in dread of the day that the brunet forgot and he walked in after a long day at the cafe to a house full of Charles' friends.

They had agreed when Charles moved in that this was his fucking house too and he could invite whoever the fuck he wanted-but he had to give Erik a heads-up. This was no longer going to be the anti-social off-limits house it had been for so long. For once people were going to actually know where Erik lived and show up there, sometimes for absolutely no reason, which Erik hadn't even fully realized was a thing until Moira stopped by with Kevin one day "just because". He had known, of course, that that was a thing that happened to Charles, but by living with him it was now a thing that happened to him too, and that was terrifying in a way that having Charles around him all the time just managed to make completely worth it.

And it still gave him shivers to drive up into their driveway, see Charles' car parked out front, the lights already on and waiting for him and perfect. Nothing made him feel better than to come home and have everything so cosily prepared for him, Charles on the couch with a space free beside him, or setting his plate at the dinner table, their cat (Charlie, but Charles seemed to be under the impression that the thing was called Magnet) waiting for him at the door to coil around his legs the moment he set foot inside, the TV or music or the fireplace already set and going, greeting him. It took a moment of sitting in his car to gear himself up for the joy of it all before he could stumble out and rush to the door.

There were no other cars there, so Erik felt confident enough in their privacy to call out as the cat wrapped his legs in purring warmth, "Strip down, _Helligkeit,_ this gardener is primed and ready to fuck his employer's son!"

In truth he shouldn't have been quite so confident.

Inside he saw Charles poised in the kitchen, in front of a pot on the stove and although he was momentarily blinded by the overwhelming burst of how much he loved this man-the shining bright eyes, the long dark hair, Charles' strong shoulders filling out his own T-shirt, the man's long black slacks showing off the absolute gorgeousness of his legs-he still managed to notice the computer. Which could only mean one thing.

"Congratulations, darling," the Brit cheered at him. "You just propositioned me in front of your mother. You must be so proud."

Pouting, Erik pushed Charlie away enough to slip his shoes off, followed by his jacket, listening as his mother's voice cried through the laptop speakers.

"_Ist es das, kleiner?" _she called.

"_Ja, Mama," _he replied, dropping his bag and dragging his feet over, accepting a kiss from Charles as the man stirred a big vat of matzoh soup. Edie smiled joyfully from the computer, waving, brushing a kiss to her fingertips and pressing them to the computer, making him blush but smile as he wrapped an arm around Charles' waist against the oven.

"_Was is hier los?"_

"We're having video matzoh lessons," Charles explained, leaning into his touch. His German had improved enough to understand that much. "I had a question and with the language barrier it's easier to show than tell. Alas, it's going to be a late-night dinner for my favorite boyfriend."

"Your favorite boyfriend isn't hungry," Erik smiled.

"Darn. Well, do _you _want any?"

Charlie meowed piteously at their shins-the damned thing hated being ignored, especially by the two of them at once. Backing up, Charles knelt down and picked the skinny cat up-like Erik the animal never seemed to keep meat on its bones-the Charlie's metallic coat sheening in the kitchen light. Charles draped the cat over his shoulder and the animal sniffed forward, craning its neck to Erik until he leaned down, pressing their noses together at which point Charlie purred and licked him.

There was an audible _snap! _and when the three of them turned they saw Edie tearfully putting away her camera.

"_Mama, did you just take a picture through the __**computer**__?" _he balked as Charles laughed, pressing his face into Erik's collar, making him laugh too.

"_You two are just so cute!"_ she defended, beaming. _"I'm so glad you __**finally **__asked him to move in with you."_

_"Ich auch."_

"Me three," Charles agreed, smiling teasingly at him. Erik smiled back and couldn't resist pressing in with a kiss, manfully resisting the urge to roll his eyes when he heard another snap of the camera through the computer.

**The End**


End file.
